COVID-19 Rapid Response: TELE Case Assessment Response Engine ICU (TELECARE-ICU)

Problem:The disaster that is the COVID-19 pandemic will leave large numbers of criticallyand subsequently chronically ill patients requiring treatment for lung scarring neurologicalconditions mental health etc. for many years to come. This will continue to place an enormousburden on our already overly stressed health care resources and personnel. This is especially truefor rural hospitals and clinics which have limited resources and expertise to deal with complexcases and critical care patients. The sheer variety potential combinations and complicationsassociated with these disorders creates patient care problems typically addressed by numeroussubspecialists in the relative calm of tertiary care intensive care units which are not available inrural hospitals.Solution: Magic Medical Solutions (MMS) proposes the TELE Case Assessment & ResponseEngine ICU (TELECARE-ICU) which is an intelligent mobile platform to providecomprehensive and automated ICU patient monitoring and assessment. It is a Bayesian Network(BN) machine learning algorithm that takes inputs from standard monitoring devices andinformation from the patient's EHR physical findings and ancillary monitoring systems toprovide automated assessments of their condition. Monitoring is continuous and the TELECARE- ICU dynamically updates the patient's status on a dashboard in real time to alert local healthcareworkers and remote telemedicine consultants of changes in their condition. The solution alsointegrates with existing telehealth capabilities so that specialists can be teleconferenced in asneeded.Objective:The overall objective of this effort is to determine the feasibility of developing amobile ICU for rural hospitals that can automatically monitor and manage patients with infectiousdiseases (such as COVID-19 and Sepsis) along with other critical care patients.During the Phase I effort we developed several foundation components of the TELECARE-ICUsystem to demonstrate its feasibility.The key component was the BN-DSS algorithm in which wedeveloped a new model which was able to successfully detect and classify several types ofinfections (including COVID-19) using an initial data set.For Phase II we will build on thesuccessful results of Phase to design/develop/demonstrate the complete TELECARE-ICU system.Benefits:This effort will decrease the demand on existing hospital and healthcare services reducethe cost of care measure treatment adherence identify disease worsening improve accessibilityto services and extend the reach of services to remote locations. TELECARE-ICU will also helpcreate local and remote medical jobs keep rural healthcare facilities operational allow a precisionmedicine approach to complex medical management and as a byproduct keep patients in theirlocal hospitals.Market Opportunity/Commercial Application:Over the last decade emergency department(EDs) visits increased 26%. Meanwhile the number of EDs declined 9% and hospitals closed198000 beds. The math is easy and very concerning. ED crowding was inevitable and has becomehighlighted with the COVID-19.Given these factors there is an inherent need for intelligentmonitoring diagnostics and intervention tools for the commercial market. TELECARE-ICUmeets this need.The primary commercial application is a stand-alone solution integrated with anEHR for the assessment and management of patients with infections (such as COVID or Sepsis)to overcome the lack of sub-specialty and critical care expertise for pre-hospital transport EDICU and chronic care in rural hospitals.