Congratulations to Dr. Mark Ansermino who was awarded a BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute / Institute of Global Health at BCCH – CHIPS grant valued at $1,500,000 to support his proposal entitled “Smart triage and smart QI (Quality Improvement)
Smart Triage and QI
Dr. Ansermino and partners at Wallimu (Uganda), the Kenya Medical Research Institute, and many other collaborators have worked collaboratively over the past decade to develop and validate data-driven risk prediction models to improve childhood mortality and morbidity outcomes in triage and discharge in low resource settings. Smart Triage is a digital triaging platform that is simple, robust, low cost, and made specifically for low-resource facilities. It uses an algorithm that identifies children as emergency, priority, or non-urgent, based on easily measurable clinical symptoms and signs which can be captured by a low-skilled, frontline healthcare worker immediately after a child arrives at a health care facility. The triage system is intuitive and starts by displaying specific danger signs chosen in collaboration with local clinical experts. To help ensure that children at hospitals around the world are receiving the best care possible, a quality improvement (QI) program, Smart QI, will be implemented alongside Smart Triage. Smart QI provides a framework for continuous QI, driven by data collected through Smart Triage. Smart Triage and Smart QI were designed with the input of frontline health workers to ensure they are easy to use with little training and limited skills. It is also low cost, affordable, and relies on technology that is readily available in low and middle-income countries.
Through a research grant received from in 2018, the team was able to successfully implement a feasibility study of Smart Triage and Smart QI at Holy Innocent’s Children’s Hospital in Mbarara Uganda with over 5,500 children. Initial results have demonstrated that when using Smart Triage, the time it took for seriously ill children to receive antibiotics was reduced by 20 percent.
The next stage of this program, with this funding, is to update and validate the triage models through robust data collection, and scale Smart Triage + QI through rigorous research at regional referral hospitals in Uganda and Kenya. Each emergency department sees about 6,000 to 8,000 children each year, the majority of children are suffering from infections such as pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria.
Mining4Life and BC Children’s Hospital Foundation, with support from the BC Children’s Research Institute (BCCHRI) and the Institute for Global Health at BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital (IGH-CW), have generously committed $1.5M for this project thus far, and endeavour for additional fundraising with the ultimate goal of improving the health and lives of vulnerable children worldwide.