Merck Launches ILÚM Health Solutions

Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, has announced the launch of ILÚM Health Solutions, which provides enterprise-wide disease management tools and services to enable improved outcomes for patients with infectious diseases, such as sepsis and pneumonia, while supporting antimicrobial stewardship initiatives. ILÚM operates independently from Merck’s pharmaceutical and vaccine products businesses as part of Merck’s Healthcare Services & Solutions (HSS) group.

"We are pleased to offer ILÚM in the United States as a way to strategically partner with health systems to fight infectious diseases and combat the threat of antimicrobial resistance," said Guy Eiferman, managing director, HSS. "It is an important step for our Healthcare Services and Solutions business, and complements Merck’s company-wide efforts to develop and deliver innovative approaches to address some of today’s most pressing health issues."

ILÚM Insight™ – ID leverages data within existing hospital IT systems to promote optimal decision making and appropriate use of antimicrobials through its clinical decision support (CDS) system and Command Center (an intuitive data dashboard). These solutions enable case monitoring and prioritization—on an individual and aggregate level based on disease state—and promote early recognition of infectious diseases, appropriate interventions, and adherence to evidence-based clinical pathways. They also provide automated outcomes reporting that is configured to hospital-specific initiatives to track quality program performance.

In 2015, ILÚM initiated a collaboration with East Jefferson General Hospital (EJGH), a 424-bed general medical and surgical hospital in Metairie, La., to pilot ILÚM’s CDS system with an initial focus on improving the impact of the hospital’s quality program for sepsis care improvement. Sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication of an infection, resulting in 750,000 deaths in the United States and more than $20 billion in aggregate costs annually, with studies demonstrating that hospitals spend approximately $34,000 caring for each patient with severe sepsis.

"East Jefferson General Hospital has a strong commitment to the early recognition and management of sepsis, which are critical to survival," said Raymond DeCorte, chief medical officer, EJGH. "We are partnering with ILÚM as part of an ongoing, hospital-wide initiative targeting sepsis quality improvement, which includes multi-disciplinary departmental collaborations and sponsorship from administration and medical leadership. This innovative solution has helped us to identify patients with sepsis faster, care for them better and reduce the use of critical hospital resources. We look forward to continuing to work with ILÚM to fight infection and support our antimicrobial stewardship initiatives."

Preliminary results from the EJGH pilot were presented at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 28th Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care in December 2016. Data showed that with ILÚM’s CDS system, clinicians at EJGH improved their identification of patients with severe sepsis and achieved high adherence rates to the hospital’s guideline-based sepsis care pathway. Comparing data from twelve months prior (control group, May 2014 to April 2015) to twelve months after (study group, September 2015 to August 2016) the ILÚM CDS implementation, there was significant improvement in clinical outcomes and reduction in utilization of healthcare resources. Among patients with all sepsis types, a reduction in hospital length-of-stay (7.11 to 6.81 days; p=0.05) was observed. Among patients with severe sepsis, significantly fewer patients developed hospital-onset shock in the study group compared to the control group (19 percent vs. 35 percent; p=0.006).

"The ILÚM team is focused on helping hospitals improve quality and optimize care by working with doctors, nurses, quality managers, pharmacists and hospital leadership every step of the way," said Dr. Brandon Palermo, executive director and chief medical officer, HSS. "We are pleased with the results achieved to date at EJGH, and look forward to presenting additional results, including mortality data, at future healthcare conferences."