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Military Doctors Join Computerized Health Care Efforts

  • Published
  • By Beth Schwinn
  • Health.mil
WASHINGTON --  A challenge the White House issued to the public and private sectors - figure out how to use the Internet to improve public services - is spurring new partnerships between military health and outside organizations to improve medical care.

At the SmartAmerica Challenge Expo in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, one participant announced a competition to create apps for doctors and hospitals and new "smart" intensive care units that would use computers to make emergency care more efficient, timely and effective. The Military Health System is collaborating on both the app competition and the smart ICU initiative.  

The Expo was the culmination of the SmartAmerica Challenge launched last year by the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. More than 100 organizations displayed dozens of so-called cyber-physical systems at the Washington Convention Center, showing how the same computer connectivity that drives the Internet could make roads, communities and medicine safer and better.

Cyber-physical systems use the capacity of the Internet to control one or more objects and allow them to interact with the physical world. At the Expo, the Military Health System and other organizations showed that in health care, cyber-physical systems include robots that take vital signs, tiny sensors that can be swallowed and feed patient information back to the hospital, computers that collect, analyze and highlight important medical data, and a "black box" data logger, similar to an airplane black box, that records every event over the course of a patient's care.

Some half dozen universities, companies and health care organizations are collaborating on the app challenge, which offers $30,000 in prizes to the developers who makes the best use of sharable computer code, freely available streaming medical data and other resources to design medical apps.

"Real-time data is available," said Dr. Julian Goldman, program director of the Medical Device Plug and Play Interoperability Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which is sponsoring the app challenge. "What would happen if developers created apps that could interpret that data?"

Details on the competition are available at the SmartAmerica app challenge website.

Conference presenters also announced that wired, interactive intensive care units are expected to open next year in New York, California and Connecticut, applying many of the lessons military doctors learned by caring for warfighters with traumatic brain injuries caused by improvised explosive devices.

The smart ICUs are planned for Columbia University Medical Center, San Francisco University Hospital, UCLA Health and Yale-New Haven Hospital. They will be fitted with computers, databases and analytical tools to help doctors rapidly process and analyze information on patients with brain trauma, so they can get started immediately on treatment, said Dick Moberg, who developed some of the technology for the "smart neuro ICU" under a grant from the Department of Defense.

Hours make a difference in brain care, Moberg said. The longer a patient goes without neurological care, the greater the possible lasting damage to the brain.

The Military Health System took part in two projects on display at the Expo. One project showed how technology could help improve care both before and after a hospital stay, including the use of information from a patient's genome to guide diagnosis and treatment. The other showed how diagnostics and treatment for traumatic brain injury can be incorporated into standard emergency care using computer networks.

By participating in the Challenge, the Military Health System was able to help shape standards and rules for sharing medical data, said Capt. Hung Trinh of the U.S. Public Health Service.

Organizers said the SmartAmerica Challenge was a way for the federal government to share its research on how information technology can help improve people's daily lives and spur experts in different fields to collaborate on applying that research to create useful technology. The federal government has spent more than $300 million on research related to cyber-physical systems, also called the "Internet of Things," in the last five years.