Current Health, which offers a suite of AI-powered remote patient monitoring solutions, announced a partnership with the Mayo Clinic to develop technologies that identify coronavirus cases and predict symptom and disease severity in patients, health care workers, and other at-risk individuals. As part of the partnership, the Mayo Clinic will become an investor in Current Health.
In light of recent U.S. FDA guidance to expand the use of remote monitoring devices that facilitate patient management, hospitals and health systems are piloting AI-enabled solutions that promise to minimize health workers’ exposure while improving health outcomes. They could also allow clinicians and practitioners to triage less severely affected patients by monitoring them in their own homes.
Current Health’s collaboration with the Mayo Clinic — which follows a similar rollout at Baptist Health in Kentucky earlier this month — will likely involve the use of wearables to collect real-world, continuous data like temperature, heart rate, oxygen saturation, activity, and posture from a subset of vulnerable patients. Health care professionals from both the Mayo Clinic and Current Health will be able to access this data to make diagnostic and treatment decisions, at least in part by investigating novel biomarkers and the ways in which they manifest in diverse populations.
Current Health’s existing patient database, which includes anonymized vital sign data and raw physiological sensor data from hundreds of patients infected with coronavirus and thousands of uninfected patients, will be made available to the aforementioned professionals, as well as algorithms developed by the 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,” wrote Mayo Clinic infectious disease specialist Dr. Abinash Virk.
