New Web-Based App to Help Clinicians Improve Patient Care

The Centre of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF Centre) and IO Informatics are partnering to develop new tools for clinicians to address chronic heart, lung and kidney disease.
The collaboration brings together the PROOF Centre’s award-winning science and IO Informatics’ leading software and semantic integration services to create a web-based software application for clinicians to use on hand-held devices or other technology. The application will be used with the PROOF Centre-developed blood tests in chronic disease and transplantation.

The application will provide clinicians with an overall score indicating patient risk level, along with the associated clinical recommendations to help guide clinical decision-making. Using gene expression data, protein expression data, and longitudinal clinical observations as inputs, the system will be a web-based reporting and alerting system accessible by clinicians securely through web browsers on workstations, laptops or standards-compliant mobile devices.

“This collaborative project represents a major step forward to realizing the promise of biomarker-based screening for precision medicine and better healthcare at lower cost,” said Dr. Bruce McManus, Director of the PROOF Centre. “By bringing together science and technology and applying it to a very real clinical need, we are creating a simple tool to help improve the care and management of patients with chronic heart, lung and kidney disease and ultimately reducing patient suffering and healthcare costs.”

Heart, lung and kidney diseases together are an oppressive growing health burden in Canada and around the world. The socio-economic impact of impaired organ failure for millions of suffering patients is far from trivial. The rising costs associated with these health conditions are an enormous toll on an already over-burdened health system. New tools to allow for early intervention that will improve the efficiency of patient care and management, and lower health care costs are needed to help address the burden. The PROOF Centre works closely with clinicians to develop new blood tests that improve the way patients are managed and bring value to the health system.

“We are excited about the opportunity to add value to the PROOF Centre’s blood test development programs. It is very rewarding to be part of a solution that will make a difference in so many patients’ quality of life,” says Dr. Erich Gombocz, Vice-President and Chief Science Officer for IO Informatics. “In addition to immediate benefits for patients, future applications of this technology will enable automated, pre-symptomatic screening for virtually any marker-based risk event, disease severity characterization or patient-centric treatment opportunity.”

By spring of 2013, the PROOF Centre will have blood tests integrated with the web-based application and ready for testing in the clinic.