The problem, as Lynn sees it, is that monitors hooked up to patients sound an alarm only when vital signs reach a specified threshold.
“We have this simple fire alarm idea that existed from the 1980s, and it didn’t evolve, it didn’t improve,” Lynn said.
The decades-old approach sometimes is helpful but often leads to “alarm fatigue” among nurses.
And too often, Lynn said, such warnings come too late in a critical window of time when a disease is rapidly progressing but still manageable.
Lynn is more of a patterns guy, arguing that technology can be used to detect and track abnormalities in a patient’s medical condition earlier in their development.
His Columbus company, Lyntek Medical Technologies, invented software that mimics radar images to model in real time changes in a patient’s condition. Think the green, yellow and red images that show the intensity of thunderstorms on weather radar maps.
“People don’t just die of some instantaneous thing,” Lynn said. “There’s an evolution of instability that is often unrecognized.”
The weather-radar concept employed by PatientStormTracker is easily grasped across cultures as well as by both medical professionals and the lay public, Lynn said.
His interest in the diagnostic technology grew out of his background in treating sleep apnea and an interest in addressing diseases such as sepsis, an entrenched scourge in hospitals.
And he said the technology can play a role in developing a response to Ebola outbreaks. Lyntek was invited in November to take part in a three-day event in Massachusetts, held at the White House’s request, to show how technology might be used to respond to Ebola.
Dr. Brian Zeno, one of Lyntek’s paid consultants and the medical director of the Center for Medical Education and Innovation at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital, said the technology seems to offer hospitals and other health-care providers an opportunity to review a disease’s progression in a patient.
Such reviews could be part of broader evaluations of an institution’s care, he said.
Lynn’s technology “seemed like a very nice way to illustrate what the overall condition of the patient is and how they are doing compared to previous days, previous weeks,” Zeno said.
A clinical trial of PatientStormTracker is in the works at Riverside, said Lynn, whose royalties from past innovations were among the largest received by U.S. physicians during the latter half of 2013.
Developing the software has taken about six years and $3 million to $4 million in programming costs, covered by royalties Lynn has received.
Beta versions of the software will be used for retrospective data analysis at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Calif., and another hospital in central Ohio in the first half of this year.
Clinical use of real-time data could begin later this year, Lynn said. He plans to include a simulated “smart ICU room” at Lyntek’s new offices at 1251 Dublin Rd.
Dr. J. Paul Curry, a Lyntek consultant and anesthesiologist who retired recently from the operating room at Hoag, said the technology will be used by a hospitalist who reviews the course of disease in patients who die and, when needed, shares lessons with the appropriate doctors.
Curry said there might be a fear of accountability among physicians, but “our team is dedicated to making sure people are not punished, but rather that they learn from this.”
There will likely be some other barriers to broad acceptance of Lynn’s technology.
“It’s quite difficult to obtain a rich, complete, real-time data set from many devices that are used in patient environments. They’re not interoperable,” said Dr. Julian Goldman, founder of a federally funded medical device “plug-and-play” interoperability research program focused on creating patient-focused, integrated clinical work environments.
“I want to see his work succeed and be adopted because I think it’s good work,” said Goldman, a Boston-based anesthesiologist who said he does not have a financial stake in Lyntek.
“We are missing opportunities by not looking at patterns.”
