More than 500 clinicians at over 370 hospitals worldwide sign up to use a new IBM app that will securely share information to care for COVID-19 patients
The COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium (COVID Critical), in conjunction with global tech giant IBM, have today announced the release of an app that will assist clinicians in intensive care units across the world access the most up-to-date medical information as they treat critically ill COVID-19 patients.
Based at The Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, COVID Critical launched in January backed by donations from the public via The Common Good, an initiative of The Prince Charles Hospital Foundation, and a collaboration with Queensland Health and Wesley Medical Research.
This funding allowed the start of a program that has seen the enrolment of over 3,500 COVID-19 patients in ICUs from all over the world, which has been synthetised into this simple to use IBM-developed web app. The app will be made available to more than 500 clinicians at over 370 hospitals around the world and runs on the secure and open IBM Cloud.
IBM Australia Managing Director, Katrina Troughton, said: “We are incredibly proud to be a partner of COVID Critical and hope that our technology will help clinicians on the front line soon.
“Following an initial pilot in Australia and the United States, the application is expected to be made available to COVID Critical clinicians based at member sites across six continents – we anticipate that the global interest could result in up to 6000 clinicians signing up to use it in the coming months.
COVID Critical founder Professor John Fraser said: “At the start of 2020, when COVID-19 was not yet well-known globally, we knew we urgently needed to share and accumulate information because clinicians on the frontline had nothing: no training or textbooks about how to fight this virus in critical care.
“This new web-based app will potentially provide them with the evidence and information they need to save lives. We are particularly excited for the difference this will make to our colleagues fighting this pandemic in low and middle-income countries, with limited resources and support. It could be a game-changer and a life-saver.”
The Common Good CEO Michael Hornby said: “2020 has been a very turbulent year, but we are proud to have been able to pull together some of the best intensive care clinicians from across the globe through COVID Critical, which has culminated in this IBM app. We have been very fortunate in Australia to have had relatively low exposure to COVID-19, however many other locations around the globe have not been as lucky. We trust that this development will assist clinicians in these locations to more quickly treat COVID patients, and hopefully save lives.”
