Using Electronic Medical Records data to Prevent Cardiac Arrests (Code Blue)

Electronic medical records (EMR) promise to transform our understanding of patients’ ailments and improve their care. NorthShore University HealthSystem in suburban Chicago has been a national leader in the implementation of EMR systems for the past decade. It is the first healthcare provider to be awarded the highest level of EMR deployment for both inpatient and outpatient care. This remarkable effort has generated much anonymized data available for innovative analytics research.

We worked with NorthShore scientists to tackle up to three distinct medical problems:

1. Childhood obesity: Growth charts are percentile curves that illustrate how kids’ height and weight change during childhood. Surprisingly, these growth curves are one-size-fits-all: there’s just one version for each sex. Our team built personalized growth curves, allowing doctors to detect childhood obesity earlier and enabling them to intervene early.

2. Code blue: when a patient goes into cardiac arrest, medical staff issue a code blue alert. Staff stop what they’re doing and attend to the patient and yet less than 80% of victims survive. We are working on predicting these medical crises before they happen, allowing doctors and nurses to intervene before patients have cardiac arrest.