TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa General Hospital is trying to cut down the time you spend at their hospital with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The research hospital unveiled its brand new “mission control” center, CareComm. The command center takes in the information of every patient that passes through its doors to make better and quicker medical decisions for them, and for future patients.
“This is the jet pack that is essentially powering us into the next century,” explained Dr. Peter Chang, vice president of care transitions at Tampa General Hospital.
CareComm has 20 artificial intelligence apps, 32 workstations and 38 large screens, all going towards one goal: Giving the patient the best possible healthcare experience.”
“Every other industry, when you look at banking, retail, even buying something online, the experience is completely different. But when you look at accessing healthcare, and that’s one of the reasons why I feel like patients might not access it earlier when they have a problem and then that initial problem becomes this big disease later on after years or months, and so there is always a fear of accessing a medical system. We want to break down those walls,” said Chang.
All patient data goes into the system, then hundreds of thousands of data points are analyzed to make better decisions.
“There’s one question as a provider I never want to ask myself. It’s why I didn’t know, or why didn’t I know sooner. And the idea of what CareComm does, is it answers that question for me," said Chang.
References to CareComm being “mission control” and NASA-esque was not lost on anyone, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was there for the unveiling.
“I mean if you told me we were in Kennedy Space Station in there, I probably would have believed you. But look, that’s a good thing, let’s harness technology," said DeSantis. "Now all this stuff, they’ve broken down all those barriers and are able to achieve efficiencies and I think that’s great.”
For patients like Tracy Schulis, efficiency is everything when your health is headed in the wrong direction.
“So I was here at 6:30 a.m. I was in a room by 6:35 a.m, the emergency room. By yesterday afternoon I had a procedure done which alleviated pain. And here I am today, and knock on wood, going home," said Schulis.
Each unique patient’s information being fed into CareComm to achieve the same goal: getting a patient back to peak health and back home.
“Patients want to be home. So the first thing they ask is when can I go home. And so the idea of this is trying to get them home, not sooner than they’re supposed to, but just at the right time for them to heal and get better," said Chang.
CareComm has been in the works for over a year. And during that time, the average hospital stay for patients at TGH has gone down by a half a day.
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