Salinas, CA Hospitals Mining Data To Make ICUs Safer

Hospitals are starting to mine data in order to make their intensive care units (ICUs) achieve better outcomes.   More than five million patients a year enter intensive-care units, where death rates range from 10% to 29%, studies show. While some deaths are inevitable, others result from high rates of avoidable complications such as infections caused by equipment and treatments. Other complications include blood clots and delirium caused by oversedation and immobility.  The big-data approach being tested by some hospitals sifts through years of medical records and information from multiple sources—including data sets that may never have been linked in a single analysis before—to find correlations no one knew existed, and thus discover more trouble spots and more potential solutions.  Hopefully this strategy can reduce the death rate in hospital ICUs.