University Health Transplant Institute has announced a partnership with the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI) to enhance care and outcomes for patients with organ failure. The collaboration aims to integrate artificial intelligence with clinical expertise, improving the Transplant Institute’s digital data environment and enabling advanced analytics for innovative research.
PCCI is currently implementing its cloud-based digital data environment, ISTHMUSTM, at University Health. This system, along with PCCI’s Community Vulnerability Compass (CVC), will provide a deeper understanding of the social barriers affecting the health and well-being of Transplant Institute patients. The CVC analyzes 26 clinical and socio-economic indicators, grouped into four thematic domains, to assess the health, resilience, and economic vitality of neighborhoods.
The first application of these technologies is the Transplant Quality and Research DataMart, a collaboration between University Health and PCCI. The DataMart is designed to provide equitable data insights to research and care teams, fostering new breakthroughs in understanding health barriers and improving care quality for Bexar County residents and beyond.
“We are proud to support University Health and its mission to provide high impact and innovative care,” said PCCI CEO, Steve Miff, PhD. “Our work will support University Health’s position as a leader in the transplant field with the implementation of a digital data environment and a transplant quality and research DataMart. This will allow the University Health Transplant Institute team to enhance and extend research and outcome studies and expand cross-industry collaborations. Adding CVC, our advanced NMDoH analytics tool, University Health will be better able to understand the NMDoH for their whole transplant population and better serve and provide enhanced access and support for their patients across the state.”
“Our Transplant DataMart is the first of its kind to use data from a large transplant program in a standardized cloud-based format by incorporating clinical metrics and non-medical drivers of health that are connected to a network of databases and other researchers across the world. This unique system will help us improve outcomes for transplant patients, perform advanced analytics, reduce barriers to care and increase grant and research opportunities to expand and share our work,” said Bryan Alsip, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of University Health.
This partnership will also advance University Health’s involvement in the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program, an international network of researchers and health databases. By integrating OHDSI into the ISTHMUSTM ecosystem, University Health teams will have access to open community data standards, software, and best practices for generating reliable clinical evidence.
Also, PCCI’s CVC will enable the University Health Transplant Institute to analyze a patient’s non-medical drivers of health (NMDoH) to make informed, equitable decisions. The CVC allows for targeted screening questions and enhanced data collection, fostering collaboration with community and healthcare organizations to support patients throughout their transplant journey.
“University Health Transplant Institute has a 53-year history of cutting-edge innovation and superior survival rates. We are now one of the two largest living donor programs in the US and number one in survival. We also have the top survival and transplant rates for kidney and lung in our region including pediatrics. We have continually expanded access to our unique patient population through new medical techniques in lung, liver, and kidney transplantation and hepatocellular tumors and cancers,” said Francisco G. Cigarroa, MD, Professor of Surgery and Director, Alvarez Transplant Center, Malú & Carlos Alvarez Distinguished University Chair, and Ashbel Smith Professorship in Surgery.
“However, data projects to analyze and share our successes, can take us weeks or even months to complete. With the rollout of PCCI’s Transplant Quality and Research DataMart, these projects will take just hours to complete. This reduced time to make data available to our fabulous team, in turn, will speed up our research and quality processes by enabling our physicians and staff to access data exponentially faster as they work to save more lives. This in turn will lead to better outcomes and enhanced access to life-saving transplantation. This also allows us to share our successes with the transplant community around the world to make lives better,” Cigarroa added.
