SAN DIEGO, April 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — CliniComp, Intl. announced today its collaboration with long-time client Dallas VA Medical Center has resulted in the development of COVID-19 (coronavirus) monitoring, surveillance, and tracking solutions to inform pandemic outbreaks and response management in large VA patient populations. The COVID-19 tools provided to VA hospitals pro bono include early warning dashboards, real-time alerts, reports and summary screens that visually show patients at severe and rising risk along with positive lab results. Forty-two VA hospitals nationwide are using the solutions to protect and care for these most vulnerable patients primarily in intensive care.

In addition to monitoring ICU patients, the cloud-based solutions can be used in the emergency department, medical-surgical (med-surg) unit, or other patient care areas of the hospital. Single screen and dashboard views display real-time COVID-19 patient surveillance data of individual VA hospitals and collectively across all VA participants. CliniComp plans to provide the pro bono solutions to other VA hospitals that choose to participate.

“We’re proud to support our courageous clinical practitioners at the frontlines battling COVID-19,” said Sandra Johnson, senior vice president of Client Services at CliniComp. “The activation of our solutions at 42 VA sites to monitor at-risk and rising risk patients and manage resources such as ventilators specific to COVID-19 contributes to critical care coordination and actionable informed decisions.”

Claibe Yarbrough, M.D., chief, Pulmonary/Critical Care, VHA North Texas Health Care System, brought the urgent need for the COVID-19 solutions to CliniComp who developed the tools. He explained the onset of the pandemic led to the urgent need for new technologies to help clinicians view patients’ ICU records remotely to better assist medical professionals at the bedside.

“A national problem is the lack of extensive rapid testing for this respiratory virus, which leads to large numbers of patients categorized as ‘under investigation,'” said Dr. Yarbrough. “Providers are doing their best to detect patients as potentially infected; however, true diagnoses are held up due to either lengthy waits for tests to be performed or that lab results are delayed for several days.”

“CliniComp’s COVID-19 monitoring, surveillance and tracking solutions find and predict at risk patients whose deteriorating conditions have yet to be officially diagnosed, but demonstrate a high probability for the disease,” he continued. “The solutions’ ability to capture real-time data speeds the lead time for the physician to initiate precautionary measures and pro-active interventions. This is an amazing and important tool to follow our patients during the pandemic and beyond.”

Forecasting COVID-19 case surges
At the enterprise-wide level the solutions can forecast surge estimates in newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases, decreases in positive patients, and increases or declines in cases in the pandemic environment.

Armed with real-time surveillance data, healthcare leaders can move forward confidently with staffing and resource capacity planning, including re-allocation of resources, distribution of ventilators and personal protection equipment (PPE) to the appropriate areas of need within a single hospital or across the VA health system, to handle the greater influx and surge of patients.

Using SOFA score to identify rising risk patients or at-risk mortality

Of special interest to clinical practitioners is the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score built into the CliniComp’s COVID-19 early warning dashboards and real-time alerts. SOFA is a mortality prediction score based on the degree of dysfunction of six organ systems.

The SOFA score is used at all VA health systems to determine the most critical patients and to plan for resource allocation to care for those patients. CliniComp implemented the use of the SOFA score during the H1N1 flu virus a decade ago to assist the VA’s universal pandemic preparation planning.

“CliniComp included the SOFA score in its COVID-19 solutions to help our VA providers identify both patients who are improving and patients who are worsening,” said Dr. Yarbrough. “Fortunately to date, we have yet to encounter any challenges such as not having enough ventilators to cover patients, but if the need arises to shift resources we are prepared to do so. In managing our current public health crisis we’re thankful to have the SOFA score being monitored in real time to help our clinical leaders manage scarce resource needs to benefit as many patients as possible.”

About CliniComp
CliniComp, Intl. offers a unique, patented, and powerful service-oriented architecture framework that can solve the problems of interoperability, scalability, adaptability, and real-time performance. It allows best-of-breed solutions to interoperate with current systems and allows for modification or replacement of modules as new needs arise. The platform is ideal for real-time analytics, alerting, and artificial intelligence applications that unites disparate systems across time and place. The culmination of over 36 years of continuous innovation, the CliniComp|EHR represents the latest advancement of a modern web-based system within a single coherent distributable database facilitating standardized communication between systems. CliniComp, Intl. has enjoyed an unrivaled track record of performance and reliability, with virtually no downtime in the most complex high acuity hospital environments for decades. Every Patient. Everywhere. For Life.  With customers supported globally 24/7, we offer fast deployment, competitive cost of ownership and support from a company you can trust.  For more information, visit www.clinicomp.com.

View the press release here.