Project of the Year, Patient Safety: Johns Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore

Johns Hopkins has a number of analytics efforts under way, including several focused on patient safety. For example, a partnership between Johns Hopkins and Microsoft is developing a solution to collect, integrate and analyze data from monitoring devices in the ICU. To be built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, the goal is to help physicians spot potential problems in their patients’ medical care that could lead to injuries and complications.

There are many other big data projects under way to improve healthcare outcomes in such areas as radiation oncology, autoimmune diseases, interventional cardiology, cancer screening, prostate cancer and cystic fibrosis. Although some of these projects are in the exploration stage, Oncospace, a SQL database and set of clinical support tools designed to improve treatment planning and medical outcomes in radiation oncology, is already being used in direct patient care.

Oncospace includes electronic medical data on cancers of the head and neck, prostate, pancreas and lung for more than 2,300 patients. Data for each type of cancer is stored in a separate cohort database on the same server using the same schema.