CResp addresses the known limitations of pulse oximetry and other wearables, offering long-term respiration data effortlessly to enable effective triage and ongoing care management.

Circadia Health announced today that it has received expedited FDA clearance for Contactless Respiration Rate (CResp®) monitoring due to COVID-19. The C100 System™ uses radar to sense wirelessly, from up to 4 feet away in adult patients.

Continuous CResp will support clinicians and save patient lives, by predicting and preventing respiratory complications through early warning scores, enabling timely interventions. The C100 features a radar sensor, proprietary radar Signal Analysis Technology (rSAT®), and cloud-based software for early detection of patient deterioration to augment clinical decision making.

Respiratory rate is routinely measured manually, through visual counting of breaths per minute by nursing staff, and is one of the earliest signs of patient deterioration. However, staff shortages result in this parameter being frequently measured incorrectly or not at all. Contactless respiration rate, CResp, has been shown to be accurate, reliable, easy-to-use, and scalable for both continuous and spot-check monitoring across the continuum of care (general care floors, skilled nursing, and home health). CResp addresses the known limitations of pulse oximetry and other wearables, offering long-term respiration data effortlessly to enable effective triage and ongoing care management.

Circadia will be launching the C100 immediately to play a critical role in helping hospitals and skilled nursing facilities combat respiratory-related illnesses including COVID-19, pneumonia, COPD exacerbations, and other forms of respiratory failure, in a wide range of patients, both in-hospital and at home. Designed for convenience and scalability, Circadia’s aim is for the C100 to become the gold standard for respiratory monitoring. The C100 eliminates patient compliance issues and helps clinicians monitor proactively and remotely to improve patient outcomes, reduce readmissions, and reduce the risk of infection transmission from patient-to-patient and patient-to-clinician.

Alongside CResp, Circadia rSAT® and AI-powered algorithms offer monitoring of motion, presence, and sleep quality. This facilitates early detection of adverse events such as falls, and recovery analysis. In addition to physiological monitoring, the C100 also offers ambient sound and light monitoring for detecting disturbances and coughing.

Dr Guy Leschziner, Chief Medical Officer of Circadia, said, “We are building a ubiquitous data-driven platform, utilizing long-term continuous physiological parameters that we capture using our technology to develop proprietary early warning risk scores for various medical conditions.”

Circadia’s Data as a Service (DaaS) model allows the C100 to be available under a subscription model with zero upfront cost to healthcare providers. The C100 generates reimbursement revenue of $123 per patient per month under CPT codes 99454, 99457, and 99458.

Fares Siddiqui, Co-founder and CEO of Circadia, said, “Our goal is to provide a frictionless solution to clinicians in order to help improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care. During this COVID-19 crisis, the FDA has recognized the life-saving potential of our technology. We are now able to deliver the most convenient and powerful method to monitor fragile patients both in-facility and remotely at home.”

Headquartered in London and founded in 2016 by Imperial College London alumni Fares Siddiqui and Michal Maslik, Circadia’s mission is to enable early detection of respiratory failure, the third leading cause of death. Circadia employs engineers, scientists, and physicians to fuse wireless sensors, medical software, and clinically validated algorithms to save patient lives.

This morning a new digital-weight-management startup out of New York City called Calibrate launched with a $5.1 million boost in seed funding led by Forerunner Ventures.

Calibrate is a one-year telemedicine program focused on weight loss that combines both prescription medications and health coaching. The end goal of the program is to help customers “reset their metabolic health.”

Users are assigned a weight coach, who can work with them to modify their eating and exercise habits, as well as things like sleep. These can then be added to the Calibrate app.

“The weight loss industry has been focusing on the number on the scale, but the science tells us it’s more complicated,” Isabelle Kenyon, founder & CEO of Calibrate, said in a statement “Sustainable results are driven not by diets, but by metabolic health. So, our program combines what’s proven to achieve it – metabolic medication and coaching on food, exercise, sleep, and emotional health habits. The result is sustainable weight loss and success beyond the scale – whole-body health, from reduced disease risk to improved day-to-day. Weight doesn’t reflect willpower. It reflects your metabolic system. It’s time we treat it that way.”

WHY IT MATTERS

The United States has struggled with the obesity epidemic for many years now. Today the CDC reports an obesity rate of 42.4% in the country. Obesity is linked to a number of health risks, including Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

THE LARGER TREND

Weight-management tools have been around for nearly the entire history of digital health. Weight Watchers was an early player in the space, but the space has become more crowded over the years. Direct-to-consumer virtual-health company Ro launched a weight-management offering in December. That initiative is focused on a digestible product called Plenity, which was designed to help the user feel full.

Over the years we’ve also seen a number of approaches to weight management. For example, Zero is a fasting app that helps users keep track of their meals, and Keyto is a startup dedicated to helping users with the keto diet.

More than 100 leading private hospitals, health-tech startups, technology companies and investors have come together voluntarily to launch a free telemedicine consultation app ‘Swasth’ to help fight the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in India.

The initiative is being led by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, Manipal Group’s Ranjan Pai, iSPIRT’s Sharad Sharma, Apollo Hospital’s Shobhana Kamineni, former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation executive Nachiket Mor and Accel’s Subrata Mitra, who form the governing council of the non-profit consortium.

Swasth’s partners include Manipal Hospitals and Apollo Hospitals, e-pharma and diagnostics startups Medlife and 1MG, new-age medical and diagnostics chain Care.Fit, and e-commerce firms Flipkart and Udaan, among others.

The grouping will make available free teleconsultations through a network of over 2,000 certified and trained doctors, which it said was in response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to use telemedicine to combat the outbreak.

The Swasth app, which will go live on June 24, will also make available resources for users to find available beds, diagnostic labs and home quarantine aids.

It being launched in three languages – English, Hindi and Gujarati, but will be scaled up to 25 languages soon.

Swasth may charge a nominal fee for its services, which could go into covering operational and salary costs as the initiative gets a more formal structure.

Swasth has raised Rs 10 crore from ACT Grants, an initiative formed to back startups fighting Covid-19 and related innovation. ACT is a collective of entrepreneurs, investors and others within the startup community.

“The governing council will also look at non-shareholder fundraising as a part of its (job),” said Yashish Dahiya, cofounder and CEO of PolicyBazaar, which is part of the network.

The company could also look at raising further capital from other foundations and CSR funds of large organisations.

The platform will add more doctors as it scales over the next few months.

“The network has a bunch of doctors who will offer their services for free and then there’s the specialist networks from Apollo and Manipal and other hospitals that are coming onboard,” Shobhana Kamineni, executive vice-chairperson of Apollo Hospitals told ET.

The short-term goal of the company is to provide a telemedicine solution for the masses, and in the mid to long-term Swasth will evolve into the Bharat Health Stack, which is an open source and interoperable technology framework for healthcare built by software products industry body iSPIRT.

Swasth is in the process of being registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act, making it a not-for-profit organisation.

“Swasth has been built in close partnership with iSPIRT and the technology teams work together. It’s an open network that’s built on top of a consent layer where the owner of the data, which is the patient, and the hospital which he/she goes to, has access to that data and nobody else,” added Dahiya.

“The framework for this (Swasth) creates an intent that we can do more. It would be a waste to drop this off after the crisis,” added Kamineni. “Neutrality, data privacy and the ability to adjudicate in a very fair manner are the basis of this framework.”

While Swasth will compete with several players in the teleconsultation and healthcare space, it also provides an avenue for companies to collaborate to bring about big changes in India’s healthcare and adjacent sectors, Dahiya added.

According to the Swasth website, it will work to “further public health goals and work in coordination with the government, the Medical Council, public health organizations and the private sector” to provide quality healthcare access to the masses.

OpenText announced Rapid Radiology, one of the largest teleradiology providers in the U.S, has selected OpenText EMR-Link as its comprehensive solution for electronic medical record (EMR) integration and computerized physician order entry (CPOE).

Rapid Radiology will use OpenText™ EMR-Link™ to streamline the delivery of radiology test results to EMR charts at healthcare facilities. This will include senior and long-term care facilities with more vulnerable patients, where rapidly sharing diagnostic results improves decision-making for timely treatment and reduces avoidable hospital readmissions. Electronic orders can now be added to results capabilities across Rapid Radiology’s users and customers, eliminating the need for the inefficient blend of paper, fax, electronic portals, and other systems facilities must use today.

“OpenText EMR-Link allows us to deliver better turnaround on patient care. An order can happen in real-time in our system now—the order comes in and it’s automatically dispatched to the correct technician, versus taking a phone call, getting a fax, getting an email, and then having to re-enter it into a system,” said Mike Spears, Executive Vice President at Rapid Radiology. “On the results side, OpenText EMR-Link allows us to automatically put the electronic radiologist report into the patient’s file, also in real-time. This closes the loop and ensures that the patient record includes all the information coming from the radiology side.”

“Diagnostic labs and imaging centers often face integration challenges in exchanging electronic information with healthcare facilities, leading to critical delays in treatment,” said OpenText Chief Product Officer Muhi Majzoub. “OpenText EMR-Link handles integration complexity and delivers the consistent connectivity that labs and imaging centers require. OpenText’s expertise in long-term care also helps Rapid Radiology to optimize the workflows between service providers and ordering physicians, leading to improved patient outcomes.”

EMR-Link eliminates the need to search for and manage paper results or faxes, helping patient care teams gain quick access to review results and develop treatment plans. The OpenText Business Network solution delivers the industry’s only cloud integration service to provide interoperability between all EMR systems in the long-term care market, ensuring seamless delivery of clinical results between providers and improving patient care. This is particularly important with the move to increased remote work, as physicians and nurses are able to review lab results online, and support personnel can review orders and ordering characteristics remotely through EMR-Link.

“We’re all about patient care,” said Rapid Radiology’s Spears. “Automatic, accurate, and accelerated data helps deliver faster clinical decisions that can improve patient outcomes and bring relief to the anxious families.”

Spears summarized the value of the OpenText solution in helping Rapid Radiology meet its goals and fulfill its commitment to advancing teleradiology with technology: “OpenText EMR-Link is key to our business. It’s what we’ve built our business on.”

About Rapid Radiology

Rapid Radiology, one of the largest teleradiology providers in the U.S., delivers diagnostic services to healthcare organizations through the support of its national radiology group and its network of expert sub-specialty radiologists. Established to expedite diagnosis and treatment, Rapid Radiology offers custom technology and intelligent workflows to enhance patient care.

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company™, enables organizations to gain insight through market leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud.

Soaring demand for oxygen prompted by the coronavirus is bringing out a stark global truth: Even the right to breathe depends on money.

In wealthy Europe and North America, hospitals treat oxygen as a fundamental need, much like water or electricity. It is delivered in liquid form by tanker truck and piped directly to the beds of coronavirus patients. Running short is all but unthinkable for a resource that can literally be pulled from the air.

But in poor countries, from Peru to Bangladesh, it is in lethally short supply. Across sub-Saharan Africa, oxygen is a costly challenge for government-funded medical facilities such as Guinea’s Donka public hospital in the capital, Conakry.

The hospital’s planned oxygen plant has never started up. So instead of piping oxygen directly to beds, a secondhand pickup truck carries cylinders over potholed roads from Guinea’s sole source of medical-grade oxygen. Outside the capital, in hospitals and medical centers in remote villages and major towns,doctors say, there is ‘no’ oxygen at all.

“Oxygen is one of the most important interventions, (but) it’s in very short supply,” said Dr Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC and current president and CEO of ‘Resolve to Save Lives’.

In Bangladesh, the lack of a centralised system for the delivery of oxygen to hospitals has led to a flourishing market in the sale of cylinders to homes. In Peru, the president has ordered industrial plants to ramp up production for medical use or buy oxygen from abroad. He allocated about $28 million for oxygen tanks and new plants.

But a massive production increase or an impromptu private marketplace are both out of reach in Guinea, where GDP per capita is $850.

Dr Aboubacar Conté, head of Guinea’s health services, said four hospitals in outlying cities will eventually get their own on-site plants to ease what he acknowledged is a need for oxygen outside the capital. — AP