Every ICU stay produces thousands of data points: vitals, labs, ventilator settings, and medication drips. But most of that information never makes it back to the bedside. We think it should. RICCC is a small, interdisciplinary group at Rush working to connect ICU data to better decisions: through federated research with the CLIF Consortium, pragmatic trials embedded in everyday workflows, and causal inference methods that help clinicians personalize care for critically ill patients.
The ICU generates thousands of data points per patient per day, but most of it sits in the EHR unused. We build models and NLP pipelines that try to change that: readmission risk scores, early deterioration alerts, and AI-assisted substance misuse screening that runs at the bedside. The goal is practical: tools that help clinicians make better decisions with data they already have.
Good ICU research needs diverse data from many hospitals, but sharing raw patient records is a non-starter for privacy. The CLIF Consortium addresses this with a shared, open-source data standard. Rush is a founding site in the network, which now covers 12 institutions, 62 hospitals, and over 808,000 ICU patients. The idea is federation over centralization: models and results move across institutions, raw data never does.
ICU care varies a lot between hospitals and between patients, and it is often unclear whether those variations matter. We run pragmatic trials embedded in everyday ICU workflows and use causal inference methods (target trial emulation, heterogeneous treatment effect modeling) to figure out which patients benefit from which interventions. Current work includes individualized oxygenation targets and ventilation strategies.
Critical illness doesn't respect disciplinary boundaries. At Rush, we work with investigators in emergency medicine and respiratory therapy on shared trials and data science, alongside biostatisticians, data scientists, and clinical informaticists. The questions that matter at the bedside don't fit neatly into one department, so neither do we.
Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, Rush University.
Assistant Professor · Associate Chief Medical Information Officer
J.C. Rojas, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist and quadruple board-certified clinician in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care, and Clinical Informatics. His research focuses on clinical data science, critical care informatics, and healthcare equity, with an emphasis on developing and studying the real-world impact of AI in the ICU and in healthcare operations to improve outcomes for critically ill and underserved patients.
Assistant Professor · Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
Kevin G. Buell, MBBS, MS, is a physician-scientist and pulmonary and critical care physician at Rush University Medical Center. His research focuses on individualized treatment effects in critical illness, airway management, and health services research, with particular interests in oxygenation targets, infection, and bedside ultrasound. A central focus of his work involves developing AI-driven approaches to personalize ventilator management for critically ill patients, including applying machine learning to optimize oxygen targets with the goal of reducing ICU mortality. He is an active contributor to the CLIF Consortium, a federated multi-institutional ICU data network.
If you work in critical care research, data science, or clinical informatics and want to collaborate, we would like to hear from you.
