A start-up from the University of Toronto (U of T) has created an app that enables health care workers dealing with COVID-19 patients to communicate faster and more effectively.
Hypercare uses location technology to help hospital workers coordinate between departments. For example, if an attending physician finds that a COVID-19 patient’s respiratory status has deteriorated, he or she can send a Hypercare text to the Critical Care Response Team (CCRT) to alert them that the patient will likely require a ventilator. The CCRT can then facilitate the safe transfer of the patient to the ICU and coordinate with the attending workers there via Hypercare for the patient to be incubated upon arrival.
“Before Hypercare, this process of coordinating care would require multiple phone calls to an operator, then waiting by a phone for the on-call medical service to be paged and call back, which is very inefficient and slow,” says Patrick Darragh chief medical innovation officer at Michael Garron Hospital (MGH), where the new app has been deployed with success.
“This [app] is particularly helpful in the care of COVID-19 patients, which requires coordination between many services such as infectious disease, infection control, respirology and critical care,” Darragh adds.
Hypercare is being offered for free to hospitals including MGH for the next three months. U of T alumnus Albert Tai developed the app and co-founded the start-up alongside Joseph Chio, assistant professor at U of T, and Umar Azhar, a software engineer. The team received support from H2i and UTEST, two of the U of T’s entrepreneurship hubs, and has secured investments from angel investors in Canada and the U.S. Source: https://www.miragenews.com/university-startup-hypercare-helps-hospitals-co-ordinate-covid-19-care-efficiently-and-securely/
