Past Projects
Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program
[Project Summary from July 23, 2003]
The Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) secured both private and public funding for a joint project with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program to develop and implement a computer-based medical record for delivery of care to Boston's homeless population. The project provides remote access to a central medical record database from portable computers. In production for over 7 years, it handles over 7000 unique longitudinal patient records. It has been restructured to take advantage of Internet and World-Wide-Web technologies, as well as recent LCS research advances in the area of portable medical record formats.
Leveraging informatics to improve the care of patients with renal disease
[Project Summary from 2007]
Nephromatic is a project that aims to use informatics tools to improve the care of patients with renal disease. Current efforts are directed at understanding barriers to care in chronic kidney disease (CKD). Future efforts will utilize this understanding to integrate decision support for management of CKD into OnCall. The Nephromatic CKD stager and golmerular filtration rate (GFR) calculator are available on the Nephromatic website.
RPIA
Referring Physician's Information Access
[Project Summary From: July 18, 2003]
The Referring Physician's Information Access (RPIA) system is a Web-based clinical information system that allows remote physicians’ offices to access the hospital’s clinical information repository. It uses a security model that links referring physicians to their patients to limit access to the entire clinical population at Massachusetts General Hospital.
RPIA's role is being replaced by the OnCall clinical web portals.
RPM
Registry Population Management
[Project Summary from 2007 - RPM was replaced by Topcare]
RPM is a web-based software that organizes and presents information about groups of patients with diabetes within the Partners System. This application is designed to help physicians, clinic managers and hospital administrators to collaboratively manage their diabetic patient population.
Diabetes Metronome
[Project Summary from 2007]
The Diabetes Metronome is an informatics-based pilot program testing an alternative strategy of care delivery that relies on visit-independent clinical actions. The application will monitor for HbA1c results and send a reminder letter with lab slip to the patient 2.5 months after the most recent HbA1c result with a follow-up at 3.5 months and 4 months if no result is recorded. The goal of this program is to reduce the interval between Hba1c results, and iteratively assist physicians in the management of chronic disease.
Shared Pathology Informatics Network
[Project Summary from 2007]
Funded by a multi-institutional grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) is the major designer and developer of technology to support a nationwide network for the indexing and retrieval of information related to stored pathology specimens. This effort has enormous implications in the genomics era, when access to specific tissues for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) samples are becoming paramount. The Spin software is an open source application released under the LGPL license. The project is hosted at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/spin-chirps
FastTrack
A hyperlipidemia management system
[2007]
Despite evidence-based guidelines, cholesterol control in high-risk patients remains persistently sub-optimal. We conducted a randomized trial of an informatics-based physician email alert system to lower LDL-cholesterol (LDL) in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) or risk equivalents. Each intervention email was linked to the electronic medical record that provided all the pertinent information on one screen. Our informatics-based system to reduce barriers to cholesterol care resulted in a statistically significant and clinically meaningful reduction in LDL levels.
NHAAP
National Heart Attack Alert Program (NHAAP)
[Project Summary from June 13, 2005]
With funding from the National Heart Attack Alert Program (NHAAP), the Laboratory of Computer Science developed an Internet-accessible teaching program called Chest Pain - The First 60 Minutes. Its goal is to improve the ability of emergency physicians and triage nurses to recognize patients with acute myocardial infarction and to offer timely state-of-the-art treatments. This self-paced program uses clinical cases that present challenging diagnostic and/or therapeutic management problems. After each case, users receive an extensive critique of their decisions, with literature references to support many of the specific comments and on-line abstracts of the articles cited.
PACath
Pulmonary Artery Catheter Waveform Interpretation Tool
[Project Summary from 2007]
Originally developed in 1993, the Pulmonary Artery Catheter Waveform Interpretation Tool (PACath) was a computer program that provided expert knowledge in interpreting and troubleshooting pulmonary artery catheter (PAC) waveforms. It emphasized problem-focused knowledge access and heavy use of graphics to explicate knowledge of relevant information associated with particular clinical contexts in PAC use. Released locally into the intensive and coronary care units at Massachusetts General Hospital, it was well received by nurses and house officers.