COVID-19 has been continuously redefining our understanding of medicine today. As the number of confirmed cases of the virus continues to rise and healthcare systems remain overwhelmed, remote monitoring has become a critical part of providing care services during the pandemic. Extending its longstanding partnership with Microsoft, GE Healthcare leveraged their collaboration to create a new cloud-based, remote-monitoring tool designed to aid clinicians as they look after ventilated COVID-19 patients.
"As both large and small hospitals treat the growing number of COVID-19 patients, the strain on healthcare providers and systems will be unprecedented," said Kieran Murphy, GE Healthcare president and CEO in a statement. "We are excited to have a partner like Microsoft to help us arm clinicians with the software tools they need."
Formally known as the Mural Virtual Care Solution, GE had originally planned to debut the new technology at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference earlier this year. But, given the rise of the pandemic, the company switched plans to completely redesign their software offering with more of a focus geared toward COVID-19. Now hosted through Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform, the tool is poised to provide hospitals with increased visibility into their ventilated patient population, helping clinicians to better identify which patients are at risk of deterioration.
With broader surveillance of patients in a hospital’s ICU, GE’s Mural technology is monitored by nurses and intensivists and can aggregate close to real-time data – sourced from ventilators, EHRs and labs – to keep them in the loop with patients’ conditions. But to ensure scalability and affordability of such a powerful tool, GE is waiving software subscription costs through January 2021.
