June 13, 2022 – Nurse expertise includes the ability to pick up cues about patients’ health from subtle changes in behavior and appearance, but these observations often get missed or under-analyzed within the electronic health record (EHR).
The CONCERN Initiative, a multi-hospital system effort led by the Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), will leverage that expertise with artificial intelligence to create prediction models that can improve patient outcomes through the CONCERN Initiative.
CONCERN (COmmunicating Narrative Concerns Entered by RNs) is a predictive tool that extracts nurses’ expert and knowledge-driven behaviors within patient health records and transforms them into observable data that support early prediction of organ failure or other critical conditions in hospitalized patients.
CUIMC is partnering with three hospital systems — Mass General Brigham (MA), Vanderbilt University Medical Center (TN), and Washington University School of Medicine/Barnes-Jewish Hospital (MO) — to test the effectiveness of the CONCERN implementation toolkit, developed to support large-scale adoption of the tool.
This initiative recently received funding from the American Nurses Foundation (the Foundation) through the Reimagining Nursing Initiative.
“CONCERN shows what nurses already know: Our risk identification is not simply a subjective clinical hunch,” said Sarah Rossetti, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Nursing at Columbia. “We’re demonstrating that nurses have objective, expert-based knowledge that drives their practice, and we’re positioning nurses as knowledge workers with tremendous value to the entire care team.”