With growing complexity in medical care, healthcare-associated infections have become more common. Patients with prolonged stays in acute care units often risk the chance of developing critical infections like sepsis. What makes it more dangerous is the challenge involved in identifying these infections at an early stage, as patients with sepsis may experience symptoms like nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain—symptoms that are usually linked to common illnesses. Further, with no confirmatory tests in place for cases like sepsis, clinical judgment highly depends on a doctor’s experience. According to Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 250,000 patients die from septic shocks each year in the U.S. While the knowledge of patient demographics and symptoms leading to sepsis are widespread, clinicians are still in search of comprehensive early detection and treatment strategies for sepsis. This is where Ambient Clinical Analytics makes an impact with its revolutionary real-time clinical decision support system, AWARE. The FDA Class II cleared platform offers a specialized tool, AWARE Sepsis DART, which not only identifies potential sepsis conditions at early stages, but also guides clinicians through the process of care.

Allen Berning, CEO of Ambient Clinical Analytics, explains that the inability of existing medical devices to detect sepsis early on has made it a life-threatening medical condition. “This is the gap we bridge,” he says. AWARE Sepsis DART uses hospital-defined sepsis detection rules to indicate if sepsis may be present or developing within a patient’s body, and then programmatically coordinates with specified caregivers to assist them in monitoring the treatment during the first critical 3 to 6 hours of care.

In addition to sepsis, Ambient Clinical Analytics’ flagship AWARE platform offers real-time access to vital process-of-care information and analytics for other critical medical conditions as well. Utilizing licensed Mayo Clinic technologies, Ambient Clinical Analytics delivers state-of-the-art real-time bedside healthcare data assimilation, communication, and analytics-based clinical decision support tools that help care providers reduce overall healthcare costs and simultaneously improve patient outcomes.

Created by clinicians for clinicians, AWARE helps clinicians obtain a “smart view” of electronic health data. Integrating with the hospital’s EMR system and bedside monitors, AWARE transforms EHR into a bedside clinical care tool that presents relevant information— customizable for the care practice—on a single screen dashboard, thus resolving information overload, which is the leading cause for cognitive medical errors. Furthermore, facilitating quick access to patient information at the point of care and using color-coded alerts to notify clinicians of a patient’s critical medical condition, AWARE aids in interventional clinical decision-making. The platform also provides an intuitive rounding checklist that offers evidence-based indexing to focus on critical elements of patient data and care delivery. Illustrating a case scenario, Berning says, “In one of our hospital installations in India, clinicians mention that AWARE’s rounding checklist results helped them determine the accurate diagnosis faster.”

Additionally, a recently published research by Mayo Clinic reveals that AWARE’s intervention has been able to reduce overall in-hospital and ICU mortality by 7 percent. Simultaneously, the length of a patient’s stay in the ICU has decreased by about 50 percent and total time span in the hospital reduced by 37 percent.

Berning largely attributes Ambient’s profound expertise in medical technology as the secret behind the company’s success. This perfect blend of technology and healthcare expertise is what makes AWARE truly “out-of-the-ordinary.” With a major focus on the Indian, Chinese, and European healthcare market, Ambient Clinical Analytics is poised to expand AWARE to other regions and usher a new revolution in healthcare analytics in the coming years.