When Theresa Foley and Phil Rozansky decided to make two multi-year gifts to support the research of John Kress, MD, director of Pulmonary and Critical Care Procedure Service, they wanted to honor his skill and compassion as a physician treating diseases of the respiratory system, since Theresa had experienced his lifesaving care firsthand. At the same time, they wanted to support his efforts to share those qualities with the next generation of physicians through his work as a teacher and mentor.
Pulmonary care presents unique challenges—physicians often need to make rapid decisions, sometimes with limited data, and beyond the initial decisions, there are long-term outcomes to consider.
Dr. Kress’s research focuses on improving outcomes for critically ill patients in the medical intensive care unit (MICU) and emphasizes patient safety and recovery—especially in cases where ventilation is required. Nationally, roughly 30 percent of patients entering an intensive care unit (ICU) require intubation and ventilation. Many patients require painkillers and sedation and spend extended periods of time bedridden. For Theresa Foley, Dr. Kress’s experience made all the difference, turning around a near-fatal diagnosis.
“I got sick in 2019 over a holiday weekend. All of a sudden, I just couldn’t breathe and had to go to urgent care. And then I woke up with John Kress standing next to me saying, ‘You’re going to live,’” Theresa said. She had been hospitalized for several months.
“The University of Chicago did some amazing things,” added her husband, Phil Rozansky. “They really just went above and beyond at every turn.”
Sharing the principles behind best practices
Phil’s time with Theresa in the ICU gave him a chance to get acquainted with Dr. Kress, not only as a physician but also as a mentor and author of a seminal textbook, Principles of Critical Care. “I spent a bunch of time in the ICU watching over Theresa during those days, and I read Dr. Kress’s textbook. It’s a remarkable book, with incredible amounts of detailed information and illustrations, and it tells you how to interpret data and act on it quickly when you don’t have all the information that you would want to have,” he said.
Reading the textbook and learning about how UChicago created a nationwide consortium, the Common Longitudinal ICU data Format (CLIF), which aggregates and analyzes clinical data using artificial intelligence (AI), gave Phil the inspiration for a philanthropic gift. He provided seed money to fund a project using AI to make the principles of the textbook—and more importantly the decision-making processes it details—widely available.
“Dr. Kress’s book is an ideal source of information to be fed into a large language model, so that it could be extended to ICUs around the world,” said Phil. “I’m excited to think how Dr. Kress’s advice could be made available to other doctors at critical moments.”
“It’s a means of disseminating information in a more readily usable format. Their support of our work has been instrumental. My whole team and I are very grateful,” said Dr. Kress.
Using AI and machine learning to improve patient outcomes
The Theresa Foley and Phil Rozansky Research Fund supports research to advance the CLIF research program, founded and led by William Parker, MD, PhD, a mentee of Dr. Kress who runs a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded data science lab at UChicago focused on the algorithmic allocation of scarce healthcare.
“My lab is very interested in using AI and other advanced approaches to improve the care of critically ill patients. Phil’s gift supports what I consider to be leading-edge research in that space. He has a vision that every patient should be able to receive the same level of care that Theresa did in our ICU,” said Dr. Parker, pictured.
Dr. Parker will lead the effort to apply next-generation techniques, including machine learning and large language models, to empower clinicians and scientists to discover new insights and improve patient outcomes.
“We first want to create AI systems to help doctors make sure they are applying the best standards of care, to do what we already know should be done for every patient. And then we want to actually train a new AI to learn from the observed data and offer improved decisions over our current standard of practice,” said Dr. Parker.
Critically, the gift also allowed data collection and analysis to continue uninterrupted between major grant awards. “This gift enabled a lot of data science productivity, bridging the gap between NIH grants,” said Dr. Parker.
For Theresa, the inspiration behind the gift is the hope that the project will support training the next generation of physicians with Dr. Kress’s compassion and love of the job. “Dr. Kress has a phenomenal bedside manner, and doctors with that quality really enjoy taking care of people. Dr. Kress is my hero—he and his team saved my life,” she said.
Phil added, “When you look at the spectrum of where you can donate, you begin to appreciate that health is the one thing that people really need and that you shouldn’t take for granted.”
