The Uniformed Services University's Surgical Critical Care Initiative (SC2i): Bringing Precision Medicine to the Critically Ill.

Abstract

Precision medicine endeavors to leverage all available medical data in pursuit of individualized diagnostic and therapeutic plans to improve patient outcomes in a cost-effective manner. Its promise in the field of critical care remains incompletely realized. The Department of Defense has a vested interest in advancing precision medicine for those sent into harm's way and specifically seeks means of individualizing care in the context of complex and highly dynamic combat clinical decision environments. Building on legacy research efforts conducted during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, the Uniformed Service University (USU) launched the Surgical Critical Care Initiative (SC2i) in 2013 to develop clinical- and biomarker-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), with the goals of improving both patient-specific outcomes and resource utilization for conditions with a high risk of morbidity or mortality. Despite technical and regulatory challenges, this military-civilian partnership is beginning to deliver on the promise of personalized care, organizing and analyzing sizable, real-time medical data sets to support complex clinical decision-making across critical and surgical care disciplines. We present the SC2i experience as a generalizable template for the national integration of federal and non-federal research databanks to foster critical and surgical care precision medicine.