GYANT, the patient connection and relationship management company, today announced a new virtual assistant solution specifically designed for health systems to offer an accessible COVID-19 screening assistant to patients. The solution, COVID-19 Emergency Response Assistant, offers screening and care navigation support as well as patient education on symptoms, prevention and preparedness.

With thousands of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., hospitals and health systems are working tirelessly to care for patients and limit the spread of the disease. GYANT’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Assistant screens for COVID-19 symptoms and risk factors, as well as directs patients to the appropriate resources and care settings. The solution also provides general information on symptoms and answers common questions about COVID-19, providing relief for overburdened call center and front desk resources.

“As a steward in the healthcare community, it is important for us to consider the needs of our industry, including our clients and their patients, at all times, particularly in extraneous circumstances,” said Stefan Behrens, COO and co-founder, GYANT. “Obviously, these enhancements were not on our product roadmap, nor were they scoped with any client, but as a leading source of health information for patients and consumers, we considered it critical to incorporate COVID-19 into our medical protocols.”

Illinois-based OSF HealthCare (OSF) is already deploying the COVID-19 solution to help patients better understand their risk for contracting the virus and help them navigate to the appropriate type of care based on their symptoms. OSF first implemented GYANT’s Digital Front Door solution in December 2019, serving patients across Illinois and Michigan where OSF operates 147 locations, including 14 hospitals. OSF originally partnered with GYANT to create a better digital health experience for patients, an aspect of care that is seeing increased utilization due to COVID-19.

“We are always looking for ways to better serve our patients and offer more personalized engagements. Our patients want the ability to communicate with us virtually, and this has only heightened with the spread of COVID-19,” said Jennifer Junis, senior vice president of Saint Gabriel Digital Health, OSF HealthCare. “With GYANT, we created Clare, a friendly and informative virtual assistant that supports patients before and during their care journey. This level of connectivity is critical in times of healthcare crisis.”

Usage rates of the virtual assistant, Clare, have significantly increased since adding GYANT’s COVID-19 solution. Clare had 14,000 interactions about COVID-19 in the first two days since her coronavirus update.

In addition, 85 percent of patients using Clare report a positive experience.

The COVID-19 Emergency Response Assistant will continuously update based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

About GYANT

GYANT, the patient connection and relationship management company, drives more meaningful patient-doctor engagements while improving care utilization and pathways. Leveraging its customizable, artificial intelligence-enabled platform, which integrates into any EHR system, GYANT creates easy to navigate and enjoyable experiences for patients that equate to cost and time savings, and improved patient conversion rates for health systems. GYANT’s unique combination of deep intelligence, physician oversight and a human-driven, empathetic approach allows health systems to solve for traditional complex care issues, ensuring that patients receive the right care – anytime and anywhere, increasing engagement, trust and loyalty along their entire healthcare journey.

About OSF HealthCare

OSF HealthCare is an integrated health system owned and operated by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, headquartered in Peoria, Illinois. OSF HealthCare employs more than 23,600 Mission Partners in 147 locations, including 14 hospitals – nine acute care, four critical access – with 2,097 licensed beds, and two colleges of nursing throughout Illinois and Michigan. The OSF HealthCare physician network employs more than 1,500 primary care, specialist and advanced practice providers. OSF HealthCare, through OSF Home Care Services, operates an extensive network of home health and hospice services. It also owns Pointcore, Inc., comprised of health care-related businesses; OSF HealthCare Foundation, the philanthropic arm for the organization; and OSF Ventures, which provides investment capital for promising health care innovation startups.

To give patients continued access to primary and specialty care while slowing the spread of COVID-19, Geisinger has expanded its telehealth services to include primary care and more than 70 specialties.

Telemedicine video visits allow patients to speak with providers in real time using video chat technology on a secure network. Telemedicine visits are available for a wide range of conditions including colds and flu, rashes, diabetes, mental health, neurologic conditions and many more.

“Telemedicine video visits ensure that our communities continue to have access to primary and specialty care while practicing social distancing and slowing the spread of COVID-19,” said David Fletcher, associate vice president of Telehealth. “Geisinger providers answer patient questions and discuss concerns in real time, just like at a regular office visit, but from the comfort of the patient’s home.”

Telemedicine visits are accessible through a smartphone (iPhone or Android), a tablet or a computer with a webcam and speaker, along with a high-speed internet connection.

To find out if telehealth is right for you or if your provider is offering virtual visits, call 866-530-6925. Patients who have an upcoming appointment with a Geisinger provider can contact their doctor’s office directly and ask about the availability of a virtual visit. Telehealth services are available to Geisinger Health Plan members at no cost through June 15, and many other insurers are waiving copays for this service.

About Geisinger
Geisinger is committed to making better health easier for the more than 1.5 million consumers it serves. Founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger, the system now includes 13 hospital campuses, a 600,000-member health plan, two research centers and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. With 32,000 employees and 1,800 employed physicians, Geisinger boosts its hometown economies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by billions of dollars annually.

To help slow the spread of COVID-19, Hillcrest Home Care, one of Nebraska’s largest skilled home health and telehealth agencies, will immediately begin real-time screening, remote monitoring and risk assessment of COVID-19 symptoms for employees and at-home patients using Medocity’s Digital Care Platform.

Medocity, a leader in enterprise virtual care technology, today launched its COVID-19 screening and remote monitoring solution for Hillcrest Home Care, part of Nebraska’s largest post-acute health services provider. Built upon Medocity’s flagship Digital Care Platform, the population-based COVID-19 program enables virtual screening, remote symptom monitoring, vital signs tracking, and proactive interventions personalized for any population, including high risk patients with multiple comorbidities.

“We recognized that during this health care crisis, we needed to quickly provide for the safety and well-being of both team members and clients in order to continue personalized skilled medical care in the home,” said Lauren Wright, Administrator of Hillcrest Home Care. “Coronavirus puts many of our home health clients, particularly those with complex conditions such as COPD and CHF, at far greater risk than before. We can now remotely monitor and track changes to temperature, oxygen levels, and other COVID-19 specific symptoms every day. This allows us to quickly identify those requiring additional healthcare attention, so that we can provide the right service at the right time. This customized service is a game changer to supplement our in-home nursing and therapy visits, and it also provides us with a HIPAA-compliant telemedicine platform for virtual visits as needed.”

In response to the expanding global threat, Medocity accelerated development of a targeted digital program with COVID-19 specific clinical protocols to:

• Aid in the early identification of possible COVID-19 cases in a population
• Proactively push frequent, consistent, relevant communications and guidance personalized to each user
• Allow for real-time active monitoring of individuals and reported symptoms
• Facilitate timely escalation of care as changes in health status are noted
• Track and report evolving COVID-19 population health statistics and trends over time to ensure resources are appropriately deployed

“The Medocity platform’s data and reporting capability allow for a systematic view of users’ COVID-19 symptoms and status in real-time and by location. There have been examples from around the globe where this type of systematic monitoring and targeted response is proving to be a key component in the fight to stop the spread of the disease,” said Robert Epstein, MD, epidemiologist, CEO of Epstein Health and member of Medocity’s Medical Advisory Board. “As hospitals and doctors-offices become inaccessible, we now see that we have to move away from reliance on in-person patient visits and use digital solutions to shift to remote, cost-effective, large-scale population surveillance and targeted intervention that would otherwise be impossible to do.”

Hillcrest Home Care clinical team members will use their own mobile devices to provide daily self-reported symptom checks to ensure they are healthy and able to report to work. Separately, low-risk at-home patients can use their own mobile devices to perform the same self-assessments. For high-risk COPD and CHF patients, Hillcrest will utilize its existing remote monitoring program with pre-configured tablets and devices supplied by Medocity. Any reported patient-vitals such as temperature, heart rate, or oxygen levels (pulse ox) that are outside pre-determined parameters will trigger real-time clinician alerts and appropriate, proactive COVID-19 interventions.

“Our remote patient monitoring capabilities can be used for chronic and complex condition management, including comorbidities, or for crisis management as we are demonstrating with our COVID-19 digital solution,” said Raj Agarwal, President, and CEO of Medocity. “Backed by recent FDA encouragement, Hillcrest Home Care providers now have visibility to patient’s at-home health status which may reduce the need for in-person visits and decrease the risk of coronavirus exposure. During this uncertain time, Medocity’s highly configurable, cloud-based digital platform allows any sponsor – including health care providers, payers, clinical researchers or public health agencies – to easily and quickly go virtual.

About Medocity
Medocity is the leading healthcare technology company transforming the management of chronic or complex disease. The Medocity Digital Care Platform is the next generation in early and proactive intervention, enabling our clients to deliver comprehensive virtual care programs for patients with any condition, anywhere in the world. The company’s award-winning HIPAA compliant solution connects all stakeholders in care, continuously monitors patient-reported data from hundreds of sources, and applies artificial intelligence to identify anomalies, send out alerts, and intervene when necessary — all in real-time, through one common ecosystem. Clinically proven across multiple chronic conditions and settings, the Medocity Platform increases engagement, improves outcomes and lowers total healthcare costs.

About Hillcrest Home Care
Hillcrest Home Care offers skilled medical home health and telehealth services to aging adults in 11 counties in Nebraska and Iowa. The agency is part of Hillcrest Health Services, which offers the widest array of senior health care and housing services in the region, including independent and assisted living, memory support, post-acute rehabilitation, long-term care, adult day services, outpatient therapy, home health, hospice and in-home personal care. Hillcrest’s 1,600+ team members enhance the lives of more than 1,500 aging adults every day.

Life-sciences-technology specialist LabCorp and health-information-management company Ciox Health are teaming up to create a U.S.-based COVID-19 patient data registry that aims to help researchers accelerate diagnosis, treatment and prevention strategies.

WHY IT MATTERS

The registry will hold HIPAA-compliant de-identified data sets that clinical researchers will use to better understand and characterize COVID-19 diagnoses and treatments, with an initial data set based on LabCorp’s nearly 500,000 completed COVID-19 tests.

Ciox’s Real Word Data division will access and curate those clinical data sets, which will scale over the coming weeks and months to eventually aggregate millions of data points.

Dr. Oren Cohen, chief medical officer of LabCorp’s Covance drug development business and Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, will serve as co-investigator of the patient data registry, and the registry’s lead investigator is LabCorp Diagnostics’ chief scientific officer Marcia Eisenberg.

The two companies hope to tackle a multitude of other questions about the disease course of the virus, and have also formed a scientific advisory committee to guide the usage of the registry and support ongoing partnerships for research.

Among the central areas of focus for the research partnership are risk factors associated with the severity of disease and environmental factors that drive susceptibility to, or protection from, the virus.

THE LARGER TREND

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, hospitals’ abilities to cope with an onrush of infected cases have been challenged in multiple ways. The use of various digital technologies to combat the pandemic could hold important lessons for the industry as a whole going forward.

The outbreak has also put a spotlight on population-health demands and on the importance of services like telehealth and remote patient-monitoring, while also highlighting the benefits and challenges of current electronic health record architectures.

Adaptive Biotechnologies and Microsoft recently announced a plan to leverage their existing partnership to map population-wide adaptive immune responses to diseases at scale in order to study COVID-19.

In March, the German Society of Infectious Diseases (DGI) initiated the establishment of a European case registry to collect clinical data of infected patients, but included multi-layered safety features that demand strict anonymity, so permitting patients who are no longer able to give their informed consent to be included in the registry.

ON THE RECORD

“Healthcare practitioners and researchers need dynamic and real-time insights about COVID-19 to address this healthcare crisis and develop better treatment options for patients,” LabCorp’s Chief Information and Technology Officer Lance Berberian, said in a statement. “Combining life sciences and data sciences, including artificial intelligence and natural language processing, is the next frontier in the battle against the virus.