Healcloud's Pandemic Heatmap

Healcloud's Pandemic Heatmap is a RWE cloud-based intelligence tool that can be used across a hospital network to enable rapid epidemiological and resource monitoring and management, identify and short list patients for interventional trials, as well as support future health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) and population health analytics.  

The Team is led by Ms. Ioana Stupariu, Healcloud's Senior Manager with 12+ years of experience in project management and currently in charge of the company's privacy compliance. 

Different countries have different levels of digitalization of the healthcare system, and even when fully digitalized, they use different systems, vendors and often various languages. Given the highly sensitive nature of the data, it is very rarely centralized or pooled in data lakes and access is restricted. Therefore, it is difficult to gather real-world data at scale to have an efficient real-time overview of a potential regional, national or global epidemiologic crisis: connecting EHRs is technically arduous, if not impossible, and often times legally challenging. 

This lack of access to RWE at scale has major effects on how we deal with identification, anticipation, mitigation and ultimately management of a potential future pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic showed us that epidemiological and resource monitoring and management are problematic, event at a local level. When in need of a fast treatment or vaccine, short listing patients for interventional trials is strenuous and laborious: the average cost of bringing a new drug to market is $1.3 billion, the entire process taking on average 10 years.

While individual tools have been developed to tackle these challenges, they follow the same pattern: they are technically diverse, localized, non-interoperable and thus they are hard to connect.

We seek to help researchers, healthcare professionals and hospitals, and by helping them, ultimately help patients. Ultimately, we aim to help them obtain better, real-time data for the decisions they need to make. 

Researchers need better, accurate data and patients for their research (commercial or academic). Hospitals and healthcare professionals need better data to make better healthcare decisions. They also need technology to support, not impede their work: a good technological framework could easily free them of some parts of their administrative burdens, with alerts, monitoring and systemic overviews. Patients get better treatments if healthcare processes get speeded up and more precise: this leads to less errors, more time spent per patients, and closer consideration of each particular case.

We believe data is the basis of personalized and better healthcare and we need to think of a framework to collect, manage and use it smartly, until the digitalization process is still not too fragmented and thus too hard to work with.

We know we have created a good system, which may help make healthcare better, thus helping more patients. Our aim is to see it installed in as many hospitals as possible. Therefore, it is in our business model that we do not charge hospitals for installations: they can use all the already-existing features of our system for free (plus all the add-ons such as population health analytics, pandemic monitoring, resource monitoring and so on - which could be added). There, we simply install the software for free.

In our pilot, we compared results from an observational clinical trial conducted in an old-fashioned way with results of a trial conducted using our technology. Results showed not only that results matched, but also that our technology speeded up the process substantially (thus also reducing costs). 

If our solution is to be installed and to function, it can have ground-breaking, long-lasting, structural effects: by offering access to better, accurate, real-time data, it can shorten the length of clinical trials, thus reducing costs; it can highlight systemic shortcomings and predict outbreaks; it can send alerts; it can support population health decision-making with accurate, up-to-date data based on RWE. Ultimately, this will certainly benefit patients, but how much exactly, it is difficult to quantify as it largely depends on the uptake of the software. 

The potential for scalability is enormous, as the system can theoretically be deployed in every hospital and medical practitioner’s office, thus allowing for large-scale mapping of any out break.

Over the next year, we aim to have the system installed and functional in at least 10 hospitals in Europe. In parallel, we are already in discussions with other 20 hospitals, and we just hired an experienced professional to support us in our international business development efforts.

In one year time, we will be ready to start discussions with national health insurance systems to see how our system can be used for population health monitoring and oubreak management. We already received feedback from a couple and will return to continue discussions as soon as we have solid traction and the solution has been further legitimized through several pilots.

In parallel, we are in discussions with two CROs to use our solution in clinical trials. We want to intensify this effort so that we continue to fund our operations. 

In three years, we want to be present outside Europe as well: we received many requests from hospitals and potential clients outside Europe already, so we want to pursue those as well. 

Measurable indicators which we can use:

- number of hospitals where our system is installed

- number of patients whose EHRs are anonymized and extracted through our system

- number of clinical trials supported, in any of the interventional phases (I-IV) or observational

- number of queries made by researchers or system users

- number of alert set up by system users

- numbers of doctors/medical directors using the system

Unfortunately, we cannot disclose specific data from our pilots due to confidentiality rules.

There are two main barriers we currently face:

1) Introductions to sites and gaining the trust of sites, to allow us to deploy the software there. That is why we need partners with credibility to facilitate introductions and support us in the intake of our solution. We already started forging such partnerships, but seek to work with other ones as well in the next year to increase legitimacy and credibility.

2) Funding. All this requires not only business development costs, but also IT costs, as the more sites we end up covering, the more IT work will need to be done to make it function. 

To do so, we are pursuing a license-based business model, in which we target commercial actors and persuade them to pay for a license fee in exchange for access to sites' data. We also retain a percentage from all revenue generated from the (commercial) use of our software by hospitals. In lack for additional funding, this will sustain our efforts and cover our operational costs to allow us to accomplish our mission.

Member of ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research.

As of August 2020, we're amongst the very few European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) certified SMEs.

We have a long-standing partnership with a top 3 global clinical research organizations in the world and several other commercial partnerships.

As soon as Covid-19 hit, we started thinking how we can use all of our work to support in the fight against Covid-19. We had little to no traction at that point and no real operational capacity, so as much as we wanted to help, and offer our software - tweaked and adapted for Covid-19 challenges - we could not really do anything.

In this last year, however, we worked on our solution and developed ways to use it for pandemic prevention and monitoring. We did research, we penned ideas for a variety of functionalities, and started exploring how to implement them in practice.

With the right push, we are now ready to do it. The Trinity challenge offers us not just potential monetary compensation, which would allow us to spend all of our time on deployment and development instead of fund-raising, but also access to networking opportunities and the required validation we need to spread our solution in the healthcare sector. 

We think this Challenge represents the perfect chance for us to finally tell our story to the world, making our voice heard and our solution available to everyone in need.

From the Trinity Challenge Member Organisations:

For deployment, we would like to propose partnerships to HKU Med and the Medical schools/arms of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Nanyang Technological University, National University Singapore, Tsinghua University, and University of Melbourne. 

Potential partners with whom we could work together on promoting our solution: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Bay Area Global Health Alliance, Clinical Health Access Initiative, Joep Lange Institute.

For the commercial aspect of the solution, we would like an introduction to GSK, who are involved in drug development and clinical trials and would be direct beneficiaries of our solution.

Other potential partners:

CROs, hospitals, medical universities, public health institutes, pharmaceutical companies.

We are also open in forging partnerships with other healthcare companies together with whom we could offer clients complementary solutions or develop joint products.