MIC’s “Scale to Serve” Program Improves Hospitals’ Ability to Deliver Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

Hospitals gain access to an FDA-cleared platform that scales up ICU bed and staff capacity, supports patients and providers, and creates long-term solutions for virtual care

Intel and Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC), an Intel Capital portfolio company, are continuing to enable broader deployments of MIC's FDA-cleared Sickbay™ platform via their Scale to Serve program. The goal is to not only support demands of the current pandemic but also provide the foundational architecture hospitals need to create a new standard of data-driven care.

“The pandemic related to the novel coronavirus has been overwhelming,” noted Emma Fauss, CEO and co-founder of MIC, the Houston-based technology company. “We are honored to have had the opportunity to help hospitals and healthcare workers on the front lines get access to the bedside data they needed to provide remote care and protect them from exposure. However, implementing a virtual care solution goes far beyond a stop-gap measure to get us through the pandemic,” noted Fauss. “Hospitals with Sickbay can finally get access to data that has never been available before in a way that healthcare has needed for years to advance the state of care, streamline their architecture, and directly impact the bottom line. It’s time for healthcare to have the advantage of today’s technology to create tomorrow’s standard of care.”

Last year, fifteen facilities, including Houston Methodist, expanded their capabilities to incorporate MIC’s Sickbay platform in vendor-agnostic, scalable and flexible virtual ICUs and remote monitoring workflows through a “Scale to Serve” program, funded in part by Intel Corporation. All told, Sickbay users are currently accessing the system and gaining actionable insights more than 2,000,000 times per month, a milestone that underscores the desperate need for real-time patient waveform data from all devices at the bedside to be accessible to every member of the care team from any location. Sickbay is also enabling hospitals to further expand remote monitoring of pulse oximetry and telemetry patients, create real-time acuity scores for patients to support virtual rounding, and develop patient-centered, real-time analytics to get ahead of patient deterioration and risk.

“Prior to the pandemic, we launched our new virtual ICU with 45 beds and quickly expanded to over 350 beds across 8 facilities, including COVID care units and surge areas like the emergency departments,” noted Roberta Schwartz, Ph.D., executive vice president and chief innovation officer of Houston Methodist. “Integrated data available within the vICU includes real-time and retrospective waveform data from cardiac monitors, ventilators, pulse oximetry and other biomonitoring devices as well as labs and medications from the EMR. We also leveraged Sickbay to create 15 near real-time acuity scoring algorithms that are combined to create an aggregate measure of risk through the vICU patient list to improve virtual rounding of the most at-risk patients, and we are now in process of expanding our Virtual Operations Center functionality to other areas throughout the hospital system, to support multiple telemedicine service lines and additional monitoring initiatives such as central telemetry and tele-sitting to improve patient outcomes,” Schwartz concluded.

Hospitals utilizing Sickbay are able to remotely monitor up to 100 patients in a single "virtual ICU" interface across facilities and view real-time and unlimited retrospective data from multiple medical devices including ventilators, cardiac monitors, NIRS and more, even if the devices are made by different vendors. All data can also be accessed on any web-enabled device to enable virtual rounding and monitoring from offices, conference rooms and homes to more efficiently use employee resources and improve care and team collaboration. Since Sickbay is built on a dedicated SaaS-based platform, fueled by Intel Xeon Scalable processors with hardware-enhanced security, hospitals are also able to simplify their IT architecture and to reduce costs, increase revenue, improve operational efficiencies, while protecting patient data privacy.

For more information or to apply, hospitals are encouraged to visit www.michealthcare.com.

ABOUT MIC

Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC) is empowering a new standard of healthcare by accessing, synthesizing, and delivering patient-specific data to clinicians to save and improve lives. Through the company’s FDA-cleared Sickbay™ virtual care and analytics platform, MIC provides a singular, interconnected architecture that helps hospitals solve clinical needs to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve operational efficiencies. MIC’s flexible, software-based solution enables rapid scaling of vendor-neutral remote patient monitoring across any inpatient setting and the ability to accelerate the development and deployment of patient-centered AI at scale. Fueled by innovative engineers, mathematicians, clinicians, researchers, and entrepreneurs whose work with clinicians at the bedside led to groundbreaking discoveries, MIC is based in Houston, Texas, and works alongside hospitals and healthcare systems across the country to create a new standard of care driven by unprecedented access to patient data. More information is available at michealthcare.com.

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