Mayo Clinic, Current partner on AI-based COVID-19 monitoring
The partnership plans to harness Current Health’s remote patient management platform and Mayo Clinic’s medical and scientific expertise to develop artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to help advance understanding of the disease, help patients, and inform development of therapies.
Data collection and analysis
The initiative will use digital biomarkers collected by Current Health’s FDA-cleared remote monitoring sensors and platform. Additionally, stakeholders expect that representatives from both institutions will be able to use the technology to expedite identification and assessment of treatment efficacy and improve care for patients diagnosed with the virus, or at elevated risk of catching it.
Chris McCann, CEO and co-founder of Current Health, told Outsourcing-Pharma that the remote monitoring effort involves wearables, sensors and other decentralized technology. Information collected from the devices will transmit back to the platform for real-time monitoring and analysis.
“Our team will perform continuous analysis of that data to try and identify which patient is deteriorating,” he said. “The information will be made available to the care management team, then connected back to the patient.”
McCann explained one purpose of the remote monitoring technology is to catch issues before they become even more serious and require admission (or readmission) into the hospital.
“It’s in the best interest of the patient, and the hospital, to try and stop the patient from being readmitted and keep them safely at home,” he added.
Understanding and predicting COVID-19
“Real-world, continuous data – from patients infected and not infected with the disease – is essential to understanding and predicting how the disease presents and evolves,” said Abinash Virk, an infectious disease expert at Mayo Clinic. “If we are successful in accomplishing our goals, we believe we will improve how patients with COVID-19 are identified, monitored, managed, and ultimately help with their recovery.”
The Mayo-Current COVID-19 collaboration will make use of Current Health’s existing patient database and algorithms developed by Mayo Clinic. This information reportedly will be used to provide individualized care to patients with complex and critical medical conditions.
“Our collective ability to save lives hinges on our ability to understand this virus quickly. COVID-19 has presented in many ways across different people, which has made it very challenging to understand the virus and how it develops,” McCann explained.
“By combining our platform with the deep medical and scientific expertise that exists at Mayo Clinic, we seek to explore both known and novel biomarkers, as well as how they manifest in entirely diverse populations. This will be critical to determining how we define, and enable effective treatment of, this disease,” he added.
Current Health reports that more than 40 hospital systems around the world use its remote patient monitoring platform to monitor and manage patient health. As the pandemic progresses, the organizations increasingly are using the technology to monitor COVID-19 patients, both in the hospital and from their homes.
