Digital Intern

Consistent Approach. Individualized Care.

About iVMD

Dr. Josh Medow, a practicing critical care physician and neurosurgeon at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, WI, found himself surrounded by critically ill patients and with limited human resources to care for them. This often meant that he could not devote as much time as he would have liked to care for brain dead or unsurvivable patients who might be organ donors. With a unit full of patients with good chances to survive his attention was often diverted from potential donors. Knowing that each potential donor may save up to eight other lives, Dr. Medow was compelled to find a way to do more to help those recipients.

stethoscope illustration

Dr. Medow engaged IT expert, Tony Frey. Together they built his flow charts into algorithms and placed them into the hospital’s electronic medical record system with a series of order sets, text instructions, and best practice alerts. Functioning at the University of Wisconsin hospital for 3 years, it is now used to care for organ donors in all the critical care units at the hospital.

As Dr. Medow’s algorithms proved successful, the team began to develop similar algorithms which would assist in caring for other critically ill patients. The company, iVMD, was created to expand product offerings and to distribute those products to other hospitals and organ procurement organizations across the country.

 

Ongoing Developments:

The Digital Intern manages blood pressure, heart rate, vascular volume, electrolytes, ventilator adjustments and breathing treatments, free water deficit corrections, diabetes insipidus, volume overload, blood product transfusions including packed red cells, plasma, and platelets, and pain and agitation. The Digital Intern is not yet available for use with critically ill patients (other than organ donors). If you are interested in beta testing this application in your own facility, please contact us.

  • Reduce variability
  • Reduce costs
  • Improve outcomes
  • Measure your results

The Digital Intern will be available for use by Organ Procurement Organizations in the next few months.

An iPad application is under development that will enable OPCs to take the power of the Digital Intern with them wherever they go. The iPad application will initially require manual data entry, but may be configured to accept data from a medical record through an interface.

Also under development is a web service that can interface with existing medical record software and can be accessed through a website wherever you have an internet connection.

In addition to the Digital Intern software, there is a comprehensive order set available to ensure all necessary labs, procedures, and medications have been ordered functioning as a comprehensive checklist. For DCD patients, pain and agitation management is included in the order set. Use of the order set with the Digital Intern software ensures that everything the Digital Intern recommends has been authorized by an order signed by the appropriate provider (OPC or physician, per your policies).

The Digital Intern’s palliative care algorithms manage a non-responsive patient’s pain and agitation using the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS score) and the Checklist of Non-Verbal Pain Indicators (CNPI).

The Digital Intern will be useful to physicians and care teams across the spectrum of clinical care. The Digital Intern seeks to reduce expensive medication use where applicable, save physician’s time, improve communication between providers and allied health professionals, improve efficiency with respect to response time to patient needs and test results, enact best practices where developed, and improve overall care.