July 12, 2023 – Researchers from Intermountain Health are helping to lead a national consortium of healthcare systems and hospitals in a new federally-funded initiative that will use advanced technologies – including AI and machine learning – to improve treatment for patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), pneumonia, and sepsis – the most common and devastating conditions found in critically ill patients.
Hundreds of thousands of people infected with the COVID virus during the pandemic who were hospitalized and in critical condition ultimately died from these conditions. ARDS, pneumonia, and sepsis, together kills hundreds of thousands of people in the United States each year.
Through a major $51.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, researchers from 22 hospitals from across the country — collaborating through a clinical coordinating center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center — will identify what makes these patients different, which will allow researchers to find targeted treatments for them.
The consortium will start enrolling patients by early 2024 and hopes to enroll 5,000 patients overall in the next five years.
Intermountain Health is leading one of six groups of healthcare systems that make up the APS Phenotyping Consortium, which plans to bring together many of the nation’s experts in phenotyping critical care illnesses.
The six lead sites of the consortium, which is structured in a hub-and-spoke model, are Intermountain Health, University of California San Francisco, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.