Children's Mercy Kansas City honored as recipient of the 2017 Microsoft Health Innovation Awards
Children’s Mercy Kansas City today announced it has been named a recipient of Microsoft Corp.’s 2017 Health Innovation Awards.
The awards, which were announced at the 2017 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Florida, recognize health organizations and their technology solution partners for using Microsoft devices and services in innovative ways that help engage patients, empower care teams, optimize clinical and operational effectiveness, and transform the care continuum. The 2017 winners are transforming the industry by creating breakthrough solutions that empower health and life sciences organizations, while meeting global, local and industry-specific compliance and security standards.
Children's Mercy received the Health Innovation Award for its Cardiac High Acuity Monitoring Program (CHAMP). Nearly 2,000 babies are born each year with congenital heart disease consisting of a single ventricle. CHAMP combines traditional single-ventricle home monitoring, a service where nurse coordinators provide triage at home for highly fragile infants, with an innovative new app developed by the Ward Family Heart Center team at Children’s Mercy. CHAMP consists of a Microsoft Surface 3 tablet with the Windows 10 operating system, connected to a database that sits in the Microsoft Cloud. Parents enter patient information into CHAMP, which transfers home monitoring data and videos in near real-time to the CHAMP home monitoring care team. Once entered into the CHAMP web portal, the data is evaluated through algorithms and can trigger instant alerts to the team for further evaluation of each single-ventricle child. Before the app and tablet were introduced, parents would check various vital signs at home, such as heartrate, weight and oxygen saturation, that are important indicators of cardiac health, and then it was up to them to provide that information to the hospital each week over the phone. Otherwise nurses would try to track down the parents to find out if they were concerned about anything.
Nationally, around 1 in 5 babies with single-ventricle heart disease, such as Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, will not survive the time period at home between the first surgery and second surgeries, known as the interstage period. Since Children’s Mercy started using the CHAMP app in March 2014, none of its 62 single-ventricle patients have died during that interstage period. Today, 55 U.S. sites, representing nearly 80 percent of all centers that perform single-ventricle heart surgery on infants, and eight international sites have expressed interest in using CHAMP.
“We’re extremely honored to have Microsoft and HIMSS celebrate CHAMP’s early success in 8 states, and this Health Innovation Award reinforces our goal to build a system that will evolve and become more intelligent over time,” said Dr. Girish Shirali, co-director of the Ward Family Heart Center at Children’s Mercy. “With more sophisticated analytics, we hope to find ways to help us treat babies quicker and even avoid hospitalization altogether.”
The Ward Family Heart Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City, one of the top pediatric cardiology and heart surgery programs in the nation, performs nearly 450 cardiac surgical procedures, provides 15,700 outpatient visits and 18,000 echocardiograms, and performs catheterization and electrophysiology procedures on more than 500 patients annually. The Heart Center’s outcomes regularly outperform the combined averages of the 114 North American children’s hospitals contributing to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons National Congenital Heart Surgery Database. Through innovative research, the Ward Family Heart Center is at the forefront of improving care and quality of life for children with congenital and acquired heart disease.
“The health industry is undergoing a seismic shift in which intelligent technologies are helping organizations, communities and individuals improve care by helping them better understand and share information,” said Laura Wallace, vice president, Health & Life Sciences, Microsoft. “This year’s Microsoft Health Innovation Award recipients are advancing the goals of improved patient engagement and care coordination through their pioneering use of Microsoft devices, platforms and cloud services.”
Nominations were submitted by health providers, payers, pharmaceutical and life science organizations, and public and private health institutions across the world for applying Microsoft technology to create transformative and highly-effective innovations. An esteemed panel of industry experts selected this year’s winners based on how their innovation represents a forward-thinking development or implementation of a solution that is delivering groundbreaking results and producing better health outcomes for more people. Recipients will be highlighted on the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com/healthinnovationawards and on the Microsoft in Health blog at https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/health/?post_type=articles.
About Children’s Mercy Kansas City
Founded in 1897, Children’s Mercy is one of the nation’s top pediatric medical centers. With not-for-profit hospitals in Missouri and Kansas, and numerous specialty clinics in both states, Children’s Mercy provides the highest level of care for children from birth through the age of 21. U.S. News & World Report has repeatedly ranked Children’s Mercy as one of “America's Best Children's Hospitals.” For the fourth time in a row, Children’s Mercy has achieved Magnet nursing designation, awarded to fewer than seven percent of all hospitals nationally, for excellence in quality care. Its faculty of more than 700 pediatric subspecialists and researchers across more than 40 subspecialties are actively involved in clinical care, pediatric research, and educating the next generation of pediatric subspecialists. Thanks to generous philanthropic and volunteer support, Children’s Mercy provides medical care to every child who passes through its doors, regardless of a family’s ability to pay. For more information about Children’s Mercy and its research, visit childrensmercy.org. For breaking news and videos, follow us on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
Learn more about the CHAMP Program and The Ward Family Heart Center at Children's Mercy.