Montco to better track COVID-19 in nursing homes
“By having automated, early access to all of today’s medical information we hope to be able to identify outbreaks days earlier.”
- Montgomery County Commissioner Dr. Valerie Arkoosh
EAGLEVILLE » Montgomery County officials have partnered with a clinical analytics provider to better track cases of COVID-19 in the county’s long-term care facilities with the goal of improving health care outcomes.
County Commissioners’ Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said Real Time Medical Systems will assist the county in providing round-the-clock electronic infectious disease surveillance of county nursing facilities that volunteer to share their data. The cloud-based software pulls data from electronic health records to identify potential infectious disease “hotspots.”
Beginning Tuesday, the county offered the free service to any long-term care facility with an electronic medical record.
“The facility volunteers to share anonymous patient data, including the number of patients with fever or cough, with our Of
fice of Public Health with the goal of assisting these facilities with trend tracking and early response,” Arkoosh explained on Monday during a daily news briefing.
The system detects infectious disease warning signs, looking for changes in temperature, respiratory rate, cough, diagnosis, and shortness of breath.
“By having automated, early access to all of today’s medical information we hope to be able to identify outbreaks days earlier,” Arkoosh said.
Real Time Medical Systems already works with more than 1000 nursing centers nationwide, officials said. The software ensures patient data is protected, providing only facility-level data to the county.
The system will not only deliver raw data, it will compare various pieces of data from the electronic health records to provide intervention analytics and to identify nursing facilities with potential problems early, officials said. The commissioners described the system as “the cutting edge of modern surveillance in nursing facility technology.”
“By identifying a problem within a facility early, we can focus limited resources and equipment and we hope save lives of patients and staff,” Arkoosh said.
“Real Time Medical is donating this service for the purposes of helping us manage the COVID-19 pandemic and we are very grateful to have this resource,” said Arkoosh, who was joined at the news briefing by fellow commissioners Kenneth E. Lawrence Jr. and Joseph C. Gale, and Dr. Alvin Wang, regional EMS medical director, and Dr. Brenda Weis, administrator of the county Office of Public Health.
Throughout the coronavirus outbreak that was first identified on March 7, county health officials have been monitoring limited data from the 75 longterm care facilities in the county that are licensed by the Pennsylvania Department of Health as well as from “other congregate care settings that have overnight services” in the county, for a total of about 620 facilities.
As of Monday, officials reported there were 306 positive COVID-19 cases involving residents of the facilities and 166 cases that involve staff at the facilities.
“The Offices of Health and Human Services are conducting coordinated efforts to have daily contact with these facilities. The vast majority of facilities have just one or two cases, but we do have a couple of facilities with bigger numbers,” Arkoosh said.
Officials said they currently do not have information to determine how many of the county’s 91 COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes.
“We don’t have the precise number. We’re still working on some locations of where people actually came from. But I can tell you that we believe that somewhere in the low 40 percent of the deaths in Montgomery County are from individuals who were at long-term care facilities,” Arkoosh said.
Montgomery County is the third largest county in the state of Pennsylvania and the first in the state to obtain the data access through Real Time Medical Systems.
Real Time Medical Systems already provides services to sixty Pennsylvania nursing centers and seven in Montgomery County.
“We are happy to be helping Montgomery County,” said Dr. Scott Rifkin, executive chairman of Real Time Medical Systems. “We strongly believe that this program will not only save the lives of both patients and staff today but will be beneficial in years to come.”