Opportunity

Patients are monitored continuously with electroencephalograms (EEGs) in intensive care units (ICUs) worldwide. Recent studies show a large percentage of ICU patients have seizures, brain ischemia, encephalopathy, or other conditions that can be detected early on an EEG, allowing therapy to be initiated promptly. 

However, continuous long-term EEG monitoring currently presents two major problems. First, providers must interpret data manually, delaying the delivery of results to care team members who rely on written reports for insight. And second, the model's inefficiency inhibits the ability to view trends over time or forecast when a patient's condition may deteriorate.

Intervention 

Penn Medicine's ICU Real-Time Informatics System (IRIS) is an automated physiologic monitoring platform designed for use in the ICU. The platform streams and analyzes long-term EEG monitoring data, utilizes a central server for event detection, and delivers care team notifications through a custom application programming interface that is HIPAA-compliant.

Impact 

IRIS improves care delivery and reduces costs by negating the need for manual data review and decreasing notification delays so that interventions can happen sooner.  

At the initial pilot site, IRIS demonstrated that it could improve ICU workflow, reduce the burden on caretakers, improve data quality, and compile clinically significant trending metrics. Additional pilots are currently underway.