https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAauoPxPtws
The Canadian woman who had the presence of mind to record a selfie as she experienced a mini-stroke attracted a lot of interest this week, particularly since the information is credited with saving her life. It demonstrates the power of video to add context to symptoms that could be tough to describe for non doctors or otherwise dismissed or misunderstood by medical staff. But for video to be even more effective, it needs to happen way sooner.
Providing more contextualized information, like videos and images, is the kind of service Beyond Lucid Technologies envisions adding to its teletriage platform for emergency medical service teams. It wants to improve the quality of data that ER physicians and nurses get before patients arrive to make care more efficient as they bring patients to the hospital. Given the golden hour for stroke patients, having an effective triage system becomes even more critical. Jonathon Feit, a co-founder of Beyond Lucid, explains the challenge this way:
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
“We often hear that hospital-side clinicians will do their own assessment when the patient arrives because they don’t trust the information they receive from EMS crews – they don’t know if the details are correct or complete. But what if they did know that the information was correct and complete? What if they could trust the information, and use it to make better decisions? Then EMS would occupy the position in the care continuum that it is intended to occupy – the frontline of clinical response. We’re literally making it possible for receiving hospitals to avoid the need to restart care when patients arrive.”
If the description by the medic is accurate enough, maybe a stroke protocol can be activated. If it’s not, then the process has to wait until the patient arrives at the emergency room. Adding relevant video and images to the content ER teams receive through the platform would help contextualize all this information and better respond to these cases.
Feit recalled a November chat he had with Bob Kocher, a partner at Venrock, in which he encouraged Feit and co-founder Christian Witt to look beyond documentation software and think about what sorts of services they could layer onto the technology platform. “He was absolutely right, and with some digging into the available numbers on the cost of emergency care (redundancies, errors, treatment delays), we immediately saw the opportunity to use our technology as a way of collecting mountains of useful information that can be made actionable very quickly.”
A recent ride-along with an EMS team in Pittsburgh underscored the importance of contextualized patient information for Feit. A cardiac monitoring device seemed to indicate that a patient was having a heart attack and Feit couldn’t figure out why the medic was ignoring it. But the medic pointed out that the patient, who was familiar to the medic, simply had an irregular heartbeat, which the device interpreted as a heart attack. Feit recalled something the medic said to him: “You have to treat the patient, not the monitor.”
He added: “If you can couch that device’s signals in the context of a longitudinal record, only then can you provide enough detail to empower smart decisions both en route and at the receiving facility, which means you have less need to start from scratch upon arrival.”
