Predictive analytics fuel Johns Hopkins 'command center'

Predictive analytics are at the heart of a control center launched this year by The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore that aims to improve patient safety and provider efficiency.

The system, housed at The Judy Reitz Capacity Command Center, monitors 14 IT systems at the hospital simultaneously, and receives roughly 500 messages per minute from those tools, according to Johns Hopkins. Twenty-four staffers from disparate departments around the organization man the command center, which was built in collaboration with GE Healthcare Partners.

Since its February launch, the system has helped to drastically improve Johns Hopkins' ability to accept transfer patients with complex medical conditions, as well as the speed of assigning emergency room patients to beds who have been admitted. The hospital also says that delays in transferring patients from operating rooms have plummeted, and that patients increasingly are being discharged in a more timely manner.

“Instead of relying on old data and information, we use information that’s very active, interactive and transparent so we can make the most informed decisions for our patients and their care,” Johns Hopkins Medicine Chief Administrative Officer for Emergency Medicine and Capacity Management Jim Scheulen says in a statement.

Below, Scheulen and other Johns Hopkins leaders go into more detail about the command center:

GE Healthcare Partners is working with Rush University Medical Center to implement a similar system in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reports. That system will open in about a year.

Cynthia Barginere, chief operating officer at Rush University Hospital, says that currently there is no one person or hub organizing the information that the command center will bring together. “There’s not a place where that information is looked at, at one time … [or] someone who’s orchestrating all of those efforts,” she told the Tribune.  

Miscommunication is one of the biggest problems in healthcare, costing $1.7 billion over a four-year period and nearly 2,000 lives, research published earlier this year shows.