Data Engineering in the ICU of the Future-Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for Neurocritical Care

Peter Dziedzic, MS

“I currently work as a Research Associate in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I am also the Director and Founder of The Center of mHealth and Innovations at Johns Hopkins Neurology. My background is in Software and Complex Systems Engineering, and my research focuses on advancing science in data science, applied research, logistics, and decision support systems. I have led projects to develop and coordinate engineering and data models for multi-center clinical trials, ensuring data integrity and regulatory compliance. Additionally, as a Co-Investigator, I have played a role in implementing the Multimodality Data Acquisition System in the Neuroscience Critical Care Unit at Johns Hopkins. This system initially covered 24 beds and currently supports over 200 ICU beds, holding more than 75TB of data for 50,000 patients. It has proven to be especially crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the importance of high frequency data acquisition in ICU settings.”

This presentation will highlight key engineering advancements in the Neurosciences Critical Care Unit (NCCU) at Johns Hopkins Hospital, emphasizing their impact on patient care. The Johns Hopkins NCCU is responsible for the care of neurological and neurosurgical patients at high risk for deterioration, including those with conditions such as strokes, brain hemorrhages, aneurysm ruptures, status epilepticus, seizures, brain tumors, and hydrocephalus. These patients are treated in a highly data intensive environment, requiring multidisciplinary teams of clinicians to make critical decisions. The presentation will provide an overview of the unit, the types of patients treated, and the interactions among stakeholders that generate critical data. It will then focus on explaining the data sources, the interaction between them, and the infrastructure used to collect, store, and manage data that supports clinical decision-making. Additionally, the presentation will showcase the Johns Hopkins NCCU as a Precision Medicine Center of Excellence (PMCOE) and its journey toward becoming an ICU of the future by implementing a system engineering approach to data collection, processing, and integration into the workflow of ICU stakeholders.