AI Helps Clinicians Improve Heart Surgery Results
Cardiologists and cardiothoracic surgeons at Cincinnati Children’s are exploring how to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the hospital journey and outcomes for heart patients. Clinicians and researchers are studying possible ways AI could extract and analyze data from heart surgery “Flight Plans.”
“The potential of using AI to improve care is tantalizing, but the true application of these methods really needs to be thoughtful,” says Michael Gaies, MD, MPH, prior medical director, Acute Care Cardiology Unit and director of the Heart Institute Data Center. “We need to study them rigorously to make sure that any conclusions we generate from AI are valid and are safe.” Dr. Gaies is now the executive co-director of the Heart Institute and division director of Pediatric Cardiology.
Flight Plans are a type of “threat and error” system developed by NASA. A handful of healthcare systems are adapting the method to make surgeries safer for all patients. The nature of the potential Flight Plan AI platform offers opportunities for leveraging AI to make distinct connections about patient conditions and potential care plans and outcomes.
Cincinnati Children’s has several efforts currently in the research and development phase, although patients and families won’t be exposed to the AI until proper vetting and approval takes place.
“We’re on the cutting edge of this technology,” says Ryan Moore, MD, MSc, director, Digital Health Innovation. “We’re working to connect the dots where there are proven and potential solutions and look at how we move forward.”
Taking Flight Plan to the Cloud
Flight Plans at Cincinnati Children’s create a visual representation of a patient’s surgical journey. The plans are built by using a subset of clinical data about a patient. The entire patient care team—including cardiologists, interventionists, nurses, surgeons and others—contributes data to the Flight Plan during the Case Management Conference.
A Flight Plan provides a way to review a patient’s surgical path through the hospital and identify areas that can be improved. It gauges outcomes and team performance and reveals areas for improvement. These are discussed at a weekly conference where every patient who undergoes a surgical intervention is discussed.
“Flight Plans are a way we learn about our decision making, our execution and our team performance,” Gaies says. “This informs our decisions for the next patient, how we pick the best treatment strategy and how we tailor our team to execute that strategy.”
It’s important to note that all available data, however, are currently limited by how they can be accessed. The methods are “wildly inefficient,” Gaies says, and limited by what a human can find in individual records.
To expand Flight Plan use, Moore; Brianne Reedy BSN, RN, Flight Plan program manager; and David Morales, MD, executive co-director of the Heart Institute, received three rounds of grant funding. Two rounds came from the Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-Up Fund, to design and develop a cloud-based Flight Plan AI platform with a Python backend to leverage AI model integration. The funding allows the team to work closely with AI tech industry leaders SFL Scientific/Deloitte and Microsoft, to enable easy Flight Plan access through the cloud and embedded AI solutions to reach as many clinicians as possible.
