A team of students and researchers at MIT, IST, and two hospitals in Lisbon and Boston are using Engineering Systems approaches to address a life-or-death issue: improved survival rates for critically ill hospital patients. André Fialho and Federico Cismondi, MPP Bioengineering doctoral students, are visiting MIT for 18 months in order to work with doctors and informatics staff at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BI) to analyze data from the Intensive Care Unit at BI. Their goal is to improve survival rates for intensive care patients by using advanced quantitative analysis techniques to identify aspects of the hospital system that may be linked to worsened health outcomes while in the hospital. In the first instance they are looking at contributing factors to “septic shock,” a syndrome that commonly forces hospital patients into intensive care.  PhD students André Fialho and Federico Cismondi As Fialho and Cismondi’s MIT advisor Stan Finkelstein explains, “When people arrive at the hospital it is to treat an underlying condition, such as heart disease or cancer. But it is usually infections or suboptimal treatment processes in the hospital that put them in the ICU. We have a great opportunity through this collaboration with physicians and IT specialists at the BI to apply the right set of analytical techniques to create a systems-based model that can lead to better patient outcomes.” Fialho and Cismondi are working with a data set from the BI in order to develop an analytical model that can then be used by the Hospital da Luz in Lisbon, another participant in the project, to inform its development of a data collection and analysis framework. The project sits within the MIT-Portugal research application area of Fundamentals of Engineering Systems, among whose leaders is the students’ IST advisor João Sousa. The early results of their work and the collaboration across academia and clinical settings demonstrate the promise of research in this area to create solutions for society within extremely complex, technology-based systems. André Fialho and Federico Cismondi see their work in the MIT-Portugal Program as giving them the tools to start their own ventures after they complete their doctorates. Cismondi, from Argentina, says he would like “to create a startup applying knowledge discovery and data mining techniques we are developing for this project to medical and other fields.” Fialho, from Portugal, would also like to start a company, and could also imagine working in the Hospital da Luz to develop some of the concepts and practices from the project. A working paper by the team from MIT, IST, and the BI will be presented at a conference in Germany this summer, and is available for downloading now. | 
