Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is the hospital affiliated with Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, serving patients throughout New England. The organization is dedicated to building a sustainable healthcare system that is proactive and innovative to provide patients with the best treatments safely and at a fair cost. One of the organization’s newest initiatives is ImagineCare, a customer-focused, evidence-based mobile healthcare solution.
The system is designed to aggregate information from a variety of data sets, giving healthcare professionals “a continuous 360 degree view” of the health of each individual patient. Data is gathered from wearable health tech devices, home sensors, clinical results, electronic health records (EHR), and social-economic information. Sophisticated algorithms including machine learning provide analytics designed to spot problems before they occur or become more serious. The system relies on specially-trained nurses who staff a 24/7 data center who respond to alerts and make decisions about what actions should be taken to respond to individual patient trends or sudden changes in biometric data. The system allows healthcare professionals to be proactive about intervention and treatment, rather than having to wait to respond to patient complaints or medical emergencies.
The ImagineCare system is powered by Microsoft technology, including the Cortana Analytics Suite. The system is set to roll out with an initial 6,000 patients starting in October. This is one of the first large-scale projects to help patients actively manage their health on an on-going basis. It’s a great experiment that is designed to capitalize on the information available to individuals and their healthcare providers, and we will get to see if it can produce the better outcomes at lower costs that we expect such a system can deliver.
