TMC PULSE

25 t m c p u l s e | j u ly 2 02 0 realized, we would have the country's first syn- dromic surveillance system. Almost at the same time, Alex Fernandez on our team got a call from a hospital CFO, asking if we had any way of predicting which patients were at high risk for COVID-19 before they walked into the emergency room. We decided to build the solution. On March 13th, we deployed Quickscreen in a hospital just north of Little Rock, Arkansas. The COVID-19 self-assessment platform pre- screens for COVID-19 in at-risk populations, helps people understand their symptoms and gives communities a way of gathering epidemio- logical data to pinpoint the severity of the disease in specific locations. Fortuitously, I had recently been introduced to Frank Denbow, a startup advocate with Microsoft for Startups. While Frank was visiting with Luminare in Houston, our team received a call from Harris County Public Health (HCPH) to discuss Quickscreen. That was a Friday. The HCPH team asked us how long it would take to deploy a version tailored to the county's needs. We said, 'Monday.' Frank and Team Microsoft were on board. We reached out to Cognitect, a company that connects information systems with software applications in the process of software development, and secured project manager Naoko Higashide and developers Jeb Beich and Jarrod Taylor. They all rolled up their sleeves alongside Luminare. Soon enough, HCPH had its own version of Luminare's Quickscreen to roll out to Harris County. The platform funneled 5.5 million people to testing sites over a 1,600-square-mile area, based on ZIP code or volunteered geolocation. Within 10 days, they had on-site COVID testing figured out. By then, our team had implemented ZIP code-based triage—type in your ZIP code and it will point you to the right resources. We got volunteer load-testing with the team at loadster.app, autonomous functional user interface testing via testrigor.com and continuous feedback from the Microsoft FastTrack group. Within three weeks, Luminare went from having a great idea to creating and deploying software directing millions of people to testing resources in Texas' most populated county and its most populous city. We had help from all over the world and con- tinue to have help. We spoke with the chief medical officer of Microsoft, the White House's technology office and many others. We are now able to use Quickscreen to help reopen the economy, serving food processing plants, hospitals, universities, the armed forces and others. Employee self-assessment and real- time analytics is key. Real work continues to happen in hospitals and clinics across the country. We count ourselves blessed to know the people we know and the tens of thousands of people who have used—and will continue to use—our software. —Sarma Velamuri, M.D., was a resident physician at Baylor College of Medicine before working as a hospitalist at CHI St. Luke's Health– Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center. This essay was edited by TMC Pulse editor Maggie Galehouse Close to $1 billion in start-up funding has fun- neled through the TMC Innovation Institute over the past four years. Thousands of companies have applied to partner with the institute, but only a few are chosen. Luminare went from a team of two to a team of 11 dedicated to working on software to help elimi- nate sepsis as the most common cause of death in U.S. hospitals. In late 2019 and the beginning of 2020, we were working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the "Stopping Sepsis Through Early Detection" showcase at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, slated for March 2020 in Orlando, Florida. Some 13,000 people were expected to visit the showcase to see a demonstration of our software product, Sagitta, and how it worked alongside technologies from other companies, including Cerner, Philips, Baxter, Halo Health, Redox and also the Washington Department of Health. Then COVID-19 hit. Our biggest marketing opportunity of the decade had just evaporated with the cancellation of the HIMSS conference. But as we were talking to the CDC about COVID-19, we realized that we could leverage our sepsis platform to build an online web tool that would drive COVID-19 self-assessment and testing based on ZIP codes. This could help reduce unnecessary hospital visits, thereby containing the spread of the disease among medical profession- als and freeing up hospital beds for the sick. If we threw in self-reported location, we " We realized that we could leverage our sepsis platform to build an online web tool that would drive COVID-19 self-assessment and testing. "

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