Chicago University researchers, through medical technology company Quant, aim to bring a new cardiac arrest warning system into hospitals.
Quant HC, a US-based medical technology startup, is commercialising technology created by the Chicago University to detect cardiac arrests before they happen.
The company is currently taking part in the US-based health technology incubator Matter.
The system developed monitors a large number of inputs from the patient, from current heart rate to kidney function and respiratory rate. From these inputs it is able to create a single numeric figure which relates to that patient’s likelihood to have a cardiac arrest.
The system can be tuned to the needs of the hospital to avoid “alarm fatigue” where the system flags anyone with a potential risk regardless of how high that risk is.
Dana Edelson, founder and chief medical officer of Quant and assistant professor of medicine at Chicago University, said: “We treat [cardiac arrest] in the hospital as if it was a really sudden event — it isn’t so sudden at all. Vital signs, they tell the story that the patient is actually deteriorating so slowly and so subtly, clinicians were having a tough time seeing it. We often don’t see those super-subtle changes that a computer might be able to detect.”
Quant is working in partnership with US-based health analytics company Apervita to bring its technology into hospitals.
