My Mother and the Story of the Genesis of the Rothman Index – Episode 4
Healthcare generates enormous volumes of clinical data, yet making sense of that information in real time remains a challenge. Subtle changes in vitals, labs, and nursing assessments often precede serious events, but when that information is fragmented across the medical record, emerging risks can go unnoticed. The central challenge facing hospitals today is not data availability, but whether that data can be integrated and presented in a way that enables timely clinical action.
That challenge sits at the heart of this episode’s conversation. If all the warning signs are already in the system, why do preventable outcomes still happen—and what would it take to make patient decline visible before it becomes a crisis?
In episode four of The Michael Rothman Podcast, Dr. Michael Rothman, an Advisory Data Scientist at Spacelabs Healthcare, shares a deeply personal account of how his mother’s avoidable hospital death became the catalyst for creating the Rothman Index, a real-time, color-coded patient acuity score now used to help clinicians recognize deterioration earlier. The episode traces the emotional, scientific, and ethical foundations of the index—from a family loss, to a realization about failures in continuity of care, to an early hospital collaboration that transformed raw data into actionable insight.
What you’ll learn…
- Why continuity of care breaks down: How shift changes, fragmented responsibility, and siloed data can obscure clear downward trends in a patient’s condition.
- The limits of clinical intuition alone: Even experienced clinicians can miss gradual deterioration when acuity isn’t quantified and trended over time.
- The birth of a new measurement: How Dr. Rothman and his brother translated bedside observations, physiological data, and modeling experience into a single, intuitive acuity score designed to surface risk early.
Dr. Michael Rothman is an Advisory Data Scientist at Spacelabs Healthcare with deep expertise in data analysis, clinical modeling, and translating complex healthcare data into actionable decision support. He is best known as the creator of the Rothman Index, a patient acuity measure integrated into major EMR systems and shown in peer-reviewed studies to reduce in-hospital mortality and unplanned ICU transfers by detecting subtle early deterioration. Previously, he served as Chief Science Officer at PeraHealth and held senior consulting and executive roles at IBM and First USA Bank, bringing decades of experience in analytics, data mining, and large-scale system integration.
Article written by MarketScale.
