With the data they need at their fingertips, staff can make better decisions for their patients

The first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered hospital Command Center of its kind in Europe is to be installed by Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the North of England. Similar to an air traffic control, but for hospitals, it will provide a clear overview across the hospital and help staff make quick and informed decisions on how to best manage patient care, The idea is to help free up clinicians to spend more time delivering care to patients and less time organizing that care, as the number of patients they see keeps growing.

The Command Center looks like a “Wall of Analytics” and pulls in historical and real-time data from the hospital’s systems, then uses AI to predict what will happen in the next 24 to 48 hours. Dedicated Command Center staff can then look at the data to determine the best course of action for the patients at the hospital.

This should help decrease patients’ length of stay, reduce the need for additional wards and beds – especially during peak winter times – and reduce cancellations for non-emergency surgery. What’s more, it will shine a light on increasing demand, pressure and risk that may affect the quality of care that patients receive – prompting interventions and proactive action.

Similar Command Centers already exist in the U.S. and Canada. Since the Command Center began operating at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, U.S., patients from other hospitals are transferred 60% faster, Emergency Room wait times have been cut by 25%, and time spent waiting in the operating theater for a post-surgical bed decreased by 70%.

Each Command Center is built specifically for a hospital to address the challenges they are facing. For example, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), also located in the U.S., was the first to leverage GE Healthcare’s Command Center to support better management of sepsis care. Each patient within OHSU’s electronic medical systems gets a sepsis risk score. If the score is higher than a given level, it will display on the sepsis tile on the wall of analytics, indicating that the patient may have sepsis or is at risk, at which time the staff actively monitors if the appropriate actions are being taken by the bedside nurse and provider teams to asses for sepsis and treat sepsis if present.

Many of the problems that the Command Center will address should result in improved safety, quality, efficiency and performance.

Every day nearly 350 people come through the Emergency Department (ED) doors at Bradford Royal Infirmary. ED admissions have grown by more than 40% and the bed capacity rate routinely exceeds 96%* at this 800-bed hospital.

The Bradford Command Center is due to open in spring 2019.  

*https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/new_reports/AAAH1903.pdf