MediCollector and Boston Children Hospital Receive Funding from NIH to Develop Next-Generation Hospital Information System

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant to MediCollector and Dr. Benjamin Matthews, Division of Medical Critical Care, Department of Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, in order to develop a ground-breaking new hospital information system.

A typical hospital bedside is cluttered with medical devices which continuously generate huge amounts of data. However, most of that data is never recorded or transmitted. This lack of integration leads to roadblocks for medical researchers and can lead to clinical workflow inefficiencies, often requiring nurses to manually enter data into electronics medical records systems. With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in healthcare, there is also a growing need to access this trove of medical data.  

MediCollector will be collaborating with Dr Benjamin Matthews of Boston Children’s Hospital to develop and test a ground-breaking new Medical Device Data System (MDDS) which will capture and record this trove of data and make it easily accessible through a simplified interface. The new system will utilize the latest HL7 FHIR protocol which is rapidly becoming the globally accepted standard for transmitting data in healthcare. This will allow external systems, such as smartphone apps and AI algorithms, to easily access live data from patients in the hospital.

“With this funding from NIBIB, MediCollector will be able to expand upon its previous work in medical device integration. The new system will allow data to be acquired from numerous medical devices simultaneously and make the data easily accessible to external systems.” states John Osborne, founder of MediCollector. “Previously, researchers and AI developers struggled to get access to live data from the hospital bedside. Our new system will utilize the HL7 FHIR standard to make it easy to capture and stream this data.”

For more information, please see the NIH’s public project summary page:

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An Interoperable HL7 FHIR-based Medical Device Data System (MDDS) For Accessing And Integrating Live Point-Of-Care Data From High-Acuity Bedside Patient Monitoring Equipment

Research reported in this article was supported by the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging And Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43EB030890 . The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.