PeraHealth and BARDA Announce Partnership to Improve COVID-19 Patient Triage

The Rothman Index provides innovative solution for emergency department as newest member of BARDA’S DRIVe Medical countermeasures portfolio

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PeraHealth, Inc., a software company that uses the Rothman Index to transform clinical decision support in healthcare, today announced that it has been awarded a contract from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA will support the development and installation of the Rothman Index Risk Triage tool (for mobile and desktop applications) as a new option for hospitals across the United States. This project aims to make an objective, COVID-19 focused, rapidly deployable triage tool widely available to U.S. hospitals via a HIPAA-secure, cloud-based application to dramatically improve response to current health threats and preparedness for future challenges.

The Rothman Index, developed by PeraHealth, is the only proven machine learning algorithm to automatically derive a real-time, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared acuity score from the vast amount of data in the electronic health record. The Rothman Index is the Universal Patient Score^TM, an objective clinical acuity metric for hospitals to rapidly identify patients that are at the highest risk of deterioration. The patented algorithm calculates a patient’s health score from vital signs, lab results, and the hundreds of factors comprising the full range of body-system nursing assessments.

The PeraHealth-BARDA collaboration will leverage PeraHealth’s expertise in machine-learning-powered software design to build a risk triage tool based on the FDA-cleared Rothman Index to assess patient risk of severe outcome in COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients at entry to the emergency department. The Rothman Index Triage tool will leverage findings just published in the journal, Critical Care Explorations, by researchers from Yale New Haven Hospital System, University of California Hospital at Irvine, LifeBridge Health, and PeraHealth, to rapidly assess patient risk for deterioration, aiding in the hospital admission triage process and clinical management. While the tool meets an immediate need with COVID-19, both PeraHealth and BARDA acknowledge that the patient assessment tool will be developed and deployed for non-COVID-19 applications in the future.

“We are grateful for, and thrilled by, BARDA’s support to fund the advancement of the Rothman Index Risk Triage tool to support healthcare professionals during the pandemic. This cost-share contract represents a critical milestone in our organization as we pivot to support patient triage in the emergency department for our hospital partners,” said PeraHealth CEO, Greg White. “Emergency department capacities have experienced historic highs in the last 12 months, so developing effective clinical decision support countermeasures is essential.”

This project has been supported in part with federal funds from HHS; ASPR; BARDA, under Contract No. 75A50121C00036.

Additional Information:

This award is one component of BARDA’s Rapidly Expanding DRIVe Medical countermeasures portfolio, visit BARDA DRIVe's Portfolio to learn more.

About PeraHealth

PeraHealth is a SaaS software company that uses the Rothman Index to transform the clinical and financial efficiency of healthcare. The Rothman Index is the first algorithm that derives a Universal Patient Score^TM from the vast amount of data in the electronic medical record to create a picture of any patient’s condition over time – any age, any disease, any care setting. It is the only algorithm proven to reduce mortality in practice. Other results include reducing length of stay and readmissions. Our customers are leading hospitals and clinicians who need to identify patients at risk of rapid decline, make decisions about transfer and discharge, predict the risk of severe infection, and improve the overall efficiency and quality of care. For more information, visit www.perahealth.com and @perahealth.