Google Joins University Of Chicago: Finding Ways To Preempt Medical Events [VIDEO]

Google and the University of Chicago Medicine recently teamed up to find ways to predict medical events. The study will try to identify patterns in patient's past medical records to prepare for future treatment.

For one thing, per WGN9, the new health tech could foresee whether someone will be hospitalized or not. Moreover, it can determine how long the patient will stay in the hospital. It could even tell if the patient's health is already deteriorating, experts said.

The team from Google and the University of Chicago primarily want to "better service the patients." Nevertheless, they assured that all of the records used in this research were stripped of personal information to protect the privacy of the patients. For the record, the team members from the tech company and the university met in a medical training at Harvard University.

According to Chicago Tribune, the University of Chicago Medicine has already spent years developing ways to predict health events. In fact, its experts have developed an algorithm called eCART that uses patient data to preempt cardiac arrest. With this, when a patient is considered at "high risk", nurses can perform extra checks on him or her.

Dr. Michael Howell, chief quality officer of the medical center, is sure that eCART has helped reduce cases of cardiac arrest. However, the rate of its effectiveness is still an open question. For his part, Dr. Samuel Volchenboum, the director of the Center for Research Informatics at the University of Chicago Medicine, stressed that this latest partnership with Google will help expand on such work.

Nonetheless, it is still too early to tell if Google could really develop a product or service using eCART. At the moment, the company is focused on demonstrating that the approach can improve patient care. Quant HC, a Chicago company, has commercialized eCART. Dr. Dana Edelson,one of the developers and now CEO of Quant HC, mentioned Amita Health Alexian Brothers Medical Center as one of the hospitals with the said technology.