CIMIT Awards Six Grants for Working Groups
CIMIT recently named six Working Groups for the FY08 program year, including four in the Clinical Systems Innovation (CSI) program, and two in the Science area. The $25,000 grants also include active facilitation assistance from CIMIT experts.
A CIMIT Working Group is an interdisciplinary team that comes together to explore an emerging area -- a new procedure, pathway or healthcare technology. The team seeks to understand current practice, evaluate solutions, identify new approaches being developed by industry and evaluate the potential for CIMIT to make a contribution.
CSI Awards
The CIMIT CSI Program seeks to make patient care safer, more accessible, more efficient, and less costly across the entire continuum of care. Through grants and facilitation services, program goals include the following: to extend the CSI network to key domains (home care, elder care and retail clinic), to introduce the CSI program with all stakeholders, and to catalyze technology innovation in “underserved settings” where most of the care is delivered.
One Working Group grant is awarded to a team headed by Kathy Duckett, RN, director of clinical programs, Partners Home Care. The working group includes representatives of Massachusetts General Hospital Palliative Care Service and MGH Geriatrics. In this project called “End of Life Care: Technologies to Connect Patients, Families and Providers, and to Control Costs,” the team will deliver written documentation of needs, market solutions including emerging technologies, survey results and system specifications.
Katherine Hesse, MD, associate medical director, MGH Senior Health, will lead a second CSI working group with members from MIT AgeLab, MIT PlaceLab and Partners IT. The group will explore “Innovative clinical systems and technologies that support geriatric patients moving across the Partners care continuum.” Special attention will be given to the fact that frail patients are often moved from one site to another, with care managed by numerous individuals including professionals, paid caregivers and family members.
A third grant is awarded to a team headed by Andrew Reisner, MD, along with Alasdair Conn, MD, and Paul Biddinger, MD, all of MGH. This working group will examine innovative opportunities to enhance patient flow and safety in the new MGH Emergency Department. After surveying a wide range of options, the group will develop a five-year plan to implement select technologies, addressing technical details and budgetary considerations.
Also selected for award is a team headed by Michael Laposata, MD, PhD, chief of laboratory medicine at MGH, and Stacy Melanson, MD, PhD, chief of laboratory medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Their proposal is “Clinical Laboratory Medicine: Moving from the Central Laboratory to the Retail Clinic and Beyond.” Among their goals are to document current and emerging point-of-care technologies in laboratory medicine and to explore potential business models for clinical laboratory medicine in retail clinics and home care.
Science Awards
Award winners in science projects are teams led by Frank Pigula, MD, at Children’s Hospital Boston, and a group headed by Lewis Lipsitz, MD, MA, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Hebrew Rehabilitation Center.
The team convened by Dr. Pigula is investigating “Fetal Cardiac Intervention.” Other team members include Dario Fauza, MD, Russell Jennings, MD, Audrey Marshall, MD, and Wayne Tworetsky, MD.
It is recognized that early intervention to treat congenital diseases can reduce or avoid secondary injuries. Children’s Hospital Boston currently has research under way in fetal intervention in many areas, including cardiology, cardiac surgery and pediatric general surgery. The goal of this working group is to identify the most pressing obstacles to fetal intervention. The subgroups created in this plan will be responsible for generating at least one research strategy to overcome obstacles.
In the working group led by Dr. Lipsitz, the team will investigate “Advanced Approaches to Physiologic Monitoring of the Aged” and plan the technical implementation of a system for long-term monitoring of an aged population. This project will provide a unique opportunity to develop techniques for the acquisition of multiple physiological signals using wearable computer technologies. The group will summarize the results, recommend approaches and identify tradeoffs to enable the establishment of a Living Laboratory of Aging at Hebrew Senior Life, a large academic geriatric organization serving nearly 5,000 elderly. Colleagues of Dr. Lipsitz will include Ihab Hajjar, MD, and Hyun Gu Kang, PhD.