As hospitals, governments, private firms and healthcare providers around the world battle the coronavirus, a collection of companies in which Intel Capital has invested – all of them small to medium-sized – offer products and services to help in the fight.
Intel Capital, the company’s venture capital firm and one of the world’s largest, estimates that it has invested more than $100 million in recent years in companies with technology-related solutions to help address the world’s most severe pandemic in more than a century.
Medical Informatics wrangles a flood of ICU data into a manageable view
Crowded beside a patient’s bed in a typical intensive care unit (ICU) is a constellation of medical technology: monitors, ventilators, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation devices, alarms and more. Each of these devices is spitting out critical patient info — in unconnected streams of data. That’s a problem.
An FDA-cleared software product called the Sickbay™ Clinical Surveillance and Analytics Platform solves this. It was created by Intel Capital-funded Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC), based in Houston. Sickbay™ gathers a patient’s key ICU data to provide single and multipatient near-real-time dashboards as well as full retrospective data views. The result: doctors, nurses and others can check on a critically ill patient’s well-being in a single glance – from afar. In this way, a single provider can keep eyes on up to 100 patients at once or create a personalized patient watchlist across units, facilities and vendors – and virtually from an office or home.
“Our virtual ICU” is based on the Sickbay platform, Dr. Roberta Schwartz with Houston Methodist Hospital recently told Becker’s Health IT. This means that “many of our providers can see the patients via virtual visits and not risk exposure in our ICU rooms,” she said.
Other hospitals across the country currently use Sickbay for flexible remote monitoring. The same hospitals are now leveraging Sickbay to rapidly scale bed capacity for COVID-19, extend staff capacity and protect providers from exposure. Sickbay unlocks data hospitals have never had access to before so they can use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create their own analytics.
Under MIC’s Scale to Serve Program and as part of Intel’s $50 million Pandemic Response Technology Initiative (PRTI), Intel and MIC are talking to hospitals across the U.S. to enable them to quickly deploy Sickbay and protect their critical care providers. Intel is funding the implementation fees and MIC is waiving the software subscription licensing fees for the first 90 days for the first 100 hospitals that qualify for the Scale to Serve Program. (Learn more about applying on the Intel Newsroom.)
VeriSIM Life helps speeds drug development
In the search for new virus-fighting drugs or vaccines, Intel Capital-funded VeriSIM Life has developed a software platform that can help speed the discovery of new pharmaceuticals.
The system from the 2-year-old San Francisco-based biotech startup can model experimental test results of thousands of drug compounds in hours, speeding the time to when human trials can begin and new drugs can reach the market.
In a recent Medium post, VeriSIM Life writes that the company “utilizes computational methods which simulate human & animal physiological phenomena that quickly identify & prioritize the solutions that have the highest probability of preclinical & clinical success.”
VeriSIM Life’s approach to drug development largely replaces animal testing with biosimulation — an approach that draws on large existing datasets from prior animal and human research to help developers model how a new drug will likely interact with the human body.
