Michael R. Pinsky, MD was invited to a private formal opening of the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering on April 16, 2008 in Oxford, UK by Professor Lionel Tarassenko, the Professor of Electrical Engineering at Oxford and the new Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.  The photograph shows Drs. Pinsky and Tarassenko in front of the poster announcing the opening.  Dr. Pinsky has been working closely with Dr. Tarassenko for the past three years on a patient safety program through a company Dr. Tarassenko founded 8 years ago, called Oxford BioSigns.  The concept behind this company is to calculate in real time and at the bedside an integrated physiological parameter from readily obtainable non-invasive monitors to assess cardio-respiratory stability.  Using this system Dr. Pinsky and Dr. Michael DeVita from the Department of Critical Care Medicine in collaboration with Marilyn Hravnak, RN, PhD from the School of Nursing developed a clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of this monitoring approach to drive Condition C activation.  Their preliminary results show that use of the BioSigns monitor greatly improve patient care and limits patient instability in a step-down unit.  The initial part of that study is in press in Archives of Internal Medicine and the complete study is being prepared for publication.  Dr. Pinsky also lectured the day before in London to a select group of health care administrators from the National Health Trust on the “Cost effectiveness of using real time integrated severity measures in the management of acute care patients.”