Baxter Signs Open Data Pledge to Improve Patient Safety

The Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) announced that Baxter International Inc., a global medical products company, has signed the PSMF’s Open Data Pledge as the 89th company to demonstrate the importance of data sharing to improving patient safety.
 
Companies that have signed the PSMF’s Open Data Pledge are committed to allowing access to the data generated by their medical devices to anyone, including researchers, software engineers and entrepreneurs, that seeks to improve patient safety. By sharing data generated by their products, in accordance with applicable patient privacy laws, these companies help further the development of predictive algorithms that can notify clinicians and patients of dangerous trends, and thus enable earlier interventions.
 
“Every day we hear more stories about hospitals wishing to use predictive algorithms to identify deteriorating patients early,” said Joe Kiani, founder and chairman of the Patient Safety Movement Foundation. “The greater the number of companies that sign the Open Data Pledge, the closer we’ll be to creating a patient data superhighway that will help create predictive algorithms and decision support tools to help hospitals reach ZERO preventable patient deaths. We thank Baxter for joining this effort.”
 
“We signed the Open Data Pledge as part of our ongoing commitment to help transform patient care and improve patient safety,” said Sumant Ramachandra, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president and chief scientific and technology officer at Baxter International. “Patient safety is paramount to our mission to save and sustain lives.”

The Patient Safety Movement Foundation encourages healthcare technology companies to share the data that their products are purchased for, subject to applicable patient privacy laws. They do so without disclosing any proprietary algorithms or protected data. Among the companies that have pledged to share their data: Cheetah Medical Inc., EarlySense, Edwards Lifesciences, GE Healthcare, IBM Watson Health, Iradimed, Masimo Corporation, Medisafe Inc., Medtronic plc, Monarch Medical Technologies, Philips Healthcare, Smiths Medical, SurgiCount Medical Inc., and Zoll Medical. 
 
Companies can make their pledge online.
 
More than 200,000 people die every year in U.S. hospitals and 4.8 million worldwide in ways that could have been prevented. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation is a global non-profit which creates free tools for patients and hospitals. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation was established through the support of the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in Healthcare to reduce that number of preventable deaths to zero. Improving patient safety will require a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers, and private payers. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation works with all stakeholders to address the problems with actionable solutions for patient safety. The Foundation also convenes the World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit. The Summit brings together some of the world’s best minds for thought-provoking discussions and new ideas to challenge the status quo. By presenting specific, high-impact solutions to meet patient safety challenges, called Actionable Patient Safety Solutions, encouraging medical technology companies to share the data their products are purchased for, and asking hospitals to make commitments to implement Actionable Patient Safety Solutions, the Patient Safety Movement Foundation is working toward zero preventable deaths.