What is Respiratory Informatics?

Respiratory informatics represents the intersection of two worlds — clinical respiratory care and health information technology.

It leverages the clinical expertise of pulmonologists, respiratory therapists, and allied health professionals alongside informatics principles to optimize the management of respiratory diseases.

As the access to health data continues to rise globally, the role of respiratory informatics is becoming increasingly vital in both clinical application and disease research.

At its core, it is the practice of collecting, managing, and analyzing (big) data generated by patients specifically with respiratory conditions, then ultimately using that real-time data to improve outcomes. Various data resources will be included such as ventilator waveforms, spirometry readings, pulse oximetry trends, sleep study outputs, and ICU monitoring streams.

The challenge has never been obtaining the data, but instead the refining of such data for meaningful usage.

Why it matters

Respiratory disease is one of the leading causes of death and increased hospital stays globally. Conditions like COPD, asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, bronchiolitis, and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) are intricate, dynamic, and profoundly unique. Treatment is typically tailored to the individual thus making each clinical decision MUCH MORE personalized.

Informatics gives clinicians, analysts, and researchers the tools to move beyond care giver intuition and population-level evidence from clinical trials, but real-time, patient-specific data analysis that is being generated at the bedside.

What it looks like in practice

Respiratory informatics works on a multitude of applications which include, but not limited to:

• Ventilator analytics platforms that flag early signs of patient-ventilator dyssynchrony; providing real-time suggestive feedback to the clinician.
• EHR built platforms based on patient specific predictive models that identifies high risk of respiratory failure.
• Quality improvement dashboards that help respiratory therapy departments track outcomes based on clinician specific decisions, calculation of specific clinicians key performance indicators (+/-) in a particular unit worked, and the reduction of variation in care.
• HL7-developed standard based natural language processing tools that extract meaningful clinical information from the unstructured notes.

Each of these represents the same fundamental idea: data, properly organized, analyzed, and utilized, can make respiratory care clinicians responsible, responsive, informed, and effective.

Who it is for

Respiratory informatics is not only for physicians, data scientists, or PhD researchers. It is increasingly relevant for respiratory therapists, pulmonologists, critical care nurses, sleep technologists, and healthcare administrators who want to develop the necessary skills of data analysis. Opening the door for respiratory analysts, whom deliver fast and efficient care by understanding the numbers behind the care.

You do not need to master the code, instead understanding what the code is producing to benefit patient care. You do need to ask questions for adequate data exploration — and be willing to follow the data wherever it leads.

That is what this journal intends to examine. Welcome to the dialogue.