Patients in intensive care sometimes end up on ventilators longer than necessary because clinicians don’t have access to real-time metrics. A 2026 Blazer Bridge Fund winner is working to change that.
The Blazer Bridge Fund (BBF) is an early-stage translational funding program, designed to support the development of inventions, and help advance technologies toward commercialization.
Abdulhakin Tlimat, M.D., Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), invented VentInsights, which provides intensive care units remote monitoring and immediate quality measurements for mechanical ventilation. 
Abdulhakin Tlimat, M.D., founder of VentInsights.
VentInsights is a vendor-agnostic platform that continuously monitors ventilated patients and tracks indicators such as lung-protective ventilation adherence, patient-ventilator asynchrony, the effort the patient or ventilator is using to move air in and out of the lungs, and extubation readiness.
Between provider visits, lung injury and harmful asynchrony can build up unnoticed, and patients who are ready to come off the ventilator can stay on it longer than necessary. Existing ventilator screens are tied to a single vendor and do not detect asynchrony, aggregate data across beds, or integrate with the electronic health record.
As a pulmonary and critical care physician, Tlimat saw how much information ventilators generate and how little of it clinicians use in real time.
“I wanted to give clinicians a tool they can use at the bedside,” Tlimat said. “Early detection and management of these harmful signals can improve ICU patient outcomes.”
Currently, VentInsights is being used in all 25 UAB Medical ICU beds. Two of the four tracking tools are live and being used by the VentInsights research team, while two are in development. UAB disclosed the intellectual property in February 2023 and approved VentInsights as a UAB startup in April 2025.
Funding from the BBF will help support VentInsights in deploying to another UAB ICU and scaling the cloud platform across both units. The funding will also support a structured effort to gather feedback from ICU providers about the platform and its potential use in clinical settings.
“The Blazer Bridge Fund helps us take VentInsights from a research tool toward a product that can reach more patients,” Tlimat said. “It lets use bring the platform to a second ICU and hear directly from the clinicians who would use it.”
To learn more, contact the inventor at
-- Oct. 15, 2026