JEDI - an executive dashboard and decision support system for lean global military medical resource and logistics management.

Each individual U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy Surgeon General has integrated oversight of global medical supplies and resources using the Joint Medical Asset Repository (JMAR). A Business Intelligence system called the JMAR Executive Dashboard Initiative (JEDI) was developed over a three-year period to add real-time interactive data-mining tools and executive dashboards. Medical resources can now be efficiently reallocated to military, veteran, family, or civilian purposes and inventories can be maintained at lean levels with peaks managed by interactive dashboards that reduce workload and errors.

Clinical engineering department strategic graphical dashboard to enhance maintenance planning and asset management.

The Clinical Engineering (a.k.a. Biomedical Engineering) Department has heretofore lagged in adoption of some of the leading-edge information system tools used in other industries. This present application is part of a DOD-funded SBIR grant to improve the overall management of medical technology, and describes the capabilities that Strategic Graphical Dashboards (SGDs) can afford. This SGD is built on top of an Oracle database, and uses custom-written graphic objects like gauges, fuel tanks, and Geographic Information System (GIS) maps to improve and accelerate decision making.

Technology's implications for health care quality. A clinical engineering perspective.

Bill Gates states in Business @ The Speed of Thought that "the 2000s will be about velocity." This "decade of velocity" is driven by the flow of digital information. Health care organizations should develop a "digital nervous system" that is distinguished from a network of computers by the accuracy, immediacy, and richness of the information it brings to health care workers and by the insight and collaboration made possible by this information. This article provides a clinical engineering perspective on technology in health care in an era of rapid change. It discusses how clinical engineers work with health care professionals to manage and adapt to technological, economic, social, and regulatory forces that are redefining our approach to health care delivery.

Knowledge management system for benchmarking performance indicators using statistical process control (SPC) and Virtual Instrumentation (VI).

Healthcare is ever changing environment and with the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospital Organization (JCAHO) emphasis on quality improvement during the past several years, and the cost-focused healthcare reforms of the 1990s, benchmarking with peer comparison, and more recently benchmarking against competitors, has taken on a new emphasis. All acute healthcare organizations accredited by JCAHO now require participation in a program titled ORYX, which is designed to use comparisons with other organizations and promote national benchmarks. The knowledge management system designed assists clinical engineering department to convert vast amounts of available data into information, which is ultimately transformed into knowledge to enable better decision-making. The systems assist in using the data as a comparison tool, to compare the performance internally and also compare performance with peer organizations using the same measures within the same measurement system. Collectively, these applications support better, faster data-driven decisions. This tool provides fast and easy access to financial and quality metrics to clinical engineering department managers, which increases their ability to perform sophisticated analysis to develop accurate models and forecasts, and make timely, data driven decisions. The project also provides a platform by means of which clinical engineering departmental procedures, data, and methods can be assessed and shared among institutions.

Virtual instrumentation and real-time executive dashboards. Solutions for health care systems.

Successful organizations have the ability to measure and act on key indicators and events in real time. By leveraging the power of virtual instrumentation and open architecture standards, multidimensional executive dashboards can empower health care organizations to make better and faster data-driven decisions. This article will highlight how user-defined virtual instruments and dashboards can connect to hospital information systems (e.g., admissions/discharge/transfer systems, patient monitoring networks) and use statistical process control to "visualize" information and make timely, data-driven decisions. The case studies described will illustrate enterprisewide solutions for: bed management and census control, operational management, data mining and business intelligence applications, and clinical applications (physiological data acquisition and wound measurement and analysis).

Vibrotactile stimulation system to treat apnea of prematurity.

We modified a system that uses vibrotactile stimulation (VTS) to treat apnea (a cessation of respiration) in neonates in order to make the system more portable and easier to use by clinicians and nurses. The biomedical engineering department at Hartford Hospital (Hartford, CT) together with the Neonatology Division at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center (CCMC) (Hartford, CT) has been involved in developing the VTS system. Clinical trails were conducted in the neonatal intensive care unit of CCMC, and further preliminary data were collected. The main components of the system are a Tacaid vibrotactile stimulator (Audiological Engineering, Somerville, MA), a neonatal physiological monitor (Model 511; CAS Medical Inc, Branford, CT), a laptop computer running Windows 95 by Microsoft, National Instruments' data acquisition cards DAQCard-1200 and DAQCard-5102, and a software application developed by Premise Development Corporation, Hartford, CT. Heart rate, oxygen saturation, pulse, thoracic impedance, nasal airflow, and electrocardiogram are recorded from the monitor to the laptop. Whenever an apneic spell is detected, the nurse has the option of triggering a 3-second, 10-V, 250-Hz square-wave pulse to the transducer. The vibrotactile transducer is placed noninvasively with tape on the infant's thorax. This stimulus should arouse the infant and end the apneic event. To facilitate clinical study, the system provides voice and visual prompts for the clinician and nurses. Preliminary data continue to support both the safety and efficacy of the VTS.