The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) of Southeast Wisconsin has awarded a $25,000 “Innovations in Healthcare Delivery Pilot Model Grant” to develop a clinical decision support system to manage patients receiving deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease.
Christopher R. Butson, Ph.D., associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery, psychiatry & behavioral medicineat the Medical College of Wisconsin, is the primary investigator of the grant.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to have great potential to improve the lives of patients with a variety of neurological conditions, and is an established therapy for Parkinson’s disease. However, a persistent problem in DBS isthe extensive and costly time necessary to choose stimulation settings after the electrode leads are implanted. This process is necessary to assure that patients are receiving the best therapeutic benefit from DBS with minimal side effects. However, recent studies from the Butson lab show that this time can be drastically reduced: preliminary data from a iPad-basedclinical decision support system showed that programming timewas reduced by more than 99% (from four hours to less than two minutes). With the CTSI grant, Dr. Butson’s research team plans to prospectively evaluate the clinical decision support system in the Movement Disorders Clinic at Froedtert Hospital.In this study, patients will be randomized after DBS surgery to standard care or selection of DBS settings using the iPaddecision support system.