A $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will fund a multi-site Precision Monitoring (PRIS-M) program using existing VA electronic health data with the aim of transforming care quality and outcomes.
The Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center, the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine will collaborate on the five-year, multi-site PRIS-M program, which will use existing VA electronic health data to implement actionable, personalized monitoring to improve care quality and outcomes, according to a VA press release.
Similar to how precision medicine refers to prevention and treatment strategies that take individual patient variability into account, precision monitoring of care uses available information on an individual to ensure that the right person receives the right data at the right time.
Projects will take place in various health care environments including the Emergency Department, inpatient units and outpatient units, and will focus on diverse medical conditions. In addition to studying the technical solutions to precision monitoring, investigators also will study how providing actionable data can be used to activate healthcare providers and teams to engage in improvement activities without drowning in information overload.
“The VA is the single largest provider of health care in the United States with a wealth of patient information and a single unified electronic health record. It is ideally poised to apply precision monitoring to transform care and outcomes for veterans and to exert national leadership in this important area,” Linda Williams, M.D., co-principal investigator of the new program, said in a statement. Dr. Williams is an investigator with the Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis and the Regenstrief Institute, and a professor of neurology at the IU School of Medicine.
“The VA’s expertise and experience with patient-specific electronic medical data may help identify strategies to ensure that patients receive the best care and, importantly, are not lost to follow-up,” Dawn Bravata, M.D., study co-principal investigator, said. “Precision monitoring is critical to that care; there are facility, cultural and medical-specialty variations in how data are used which we must overcome.” Dr. Bravata is an investigator with the Roudebush VA Medical Center and the Regenstrief Institute, and a professor of medicine at the IU School of Medicine.
The new grant supports four precision monitoring related projects:
- Nationwide implementation of electronic quality indicators for inpatient stroke care (led by Dr. Williams)
- Use of patient-specific data and telehealth technology to facilitate improvement in care for veterans with transient ischemic attack (led by Dr. Bravata)
- Remote monitoring of continuous positive airway pressure for patients with sleep apnea (led by Dr. Bravata and funded with an additional $100,000 grant from the Roudebush VA Medical Center)
- Reduction of inappropriate carotid artery imaging orders (led by Salomeh Keyhani, M.D., San Francisco VA and UCSF)
