TMC PULSE

24 t m c n e w s . o r g Spotlight on COVID-19 C M Y CM MY CY CMY K Houston TMC Pulse_ad_6_2020.pdf 1 6/5/20 4:49 PM SARMA VELAMURI, M.D., is CEO of Luminare, a Houston-based digital platform company that directed 5.5 million people to COVID-19 testing sites in just 21 days. He posted a version of this essay on LinkedIn on May 5, 2020. Six years ago, my friend's daughter died of sepsis. It's a story I have told more than a thousand times, to anyone who has spent any amount of time in the same room with me and asked me why I do what I do. That death compelled Marcus Rydberg and me to launch Luminare in my garage, with the mission to stop 250,000 people annually from dying of sepsis in United States hospitals. Over the past five years, we did a few funding rounds (including the one where I mortgaged the house and broke the 401K and retirement funds), navigated the regulatory world and finally moved from a garage office with IKEA furniture to a state- of-the-art space in the TMC Innovation Institute— part of the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical city. But it's a respiratory disease. Our boss put that responsibility on us, knowing what we're capable of. We are able to go deep into the patient's nostrils and get the sample, and not be scared of it because we deal with that every day. On a regular basis, we go into a patient's nose, get samples, get sputum and send it to the lab for testing. My wife and I watch the news a lot. It was what happened in New York that woke me up. And I'm asking myself, 'What if this happened in Houston?' Then on March 24, there was a patient in a bed in the neuro ICU. He came to the hospital three days before, but he was not a COVID-19 patient. All of a sudden, when I came back Monday, the patient was in isolation as a PUI. I'm thinking, 'What happened? How?' A patient may not be a COVID-19 patient one day, but you come back the next day and the patient is a PUI. That was the problem. Knowing that I took this patient to get a CT scan, stayed with this patient without a gown, mask or any- thing and to find out that the patient is a PUI, it was really challenging. That's when I realized, 'Wow, we're really dealing with something that is very strange.' Everybody could be a PUI. You start to think, 'Who are the patients that I've seen in the past that could be PUI?' Everybody is con- cerned. You go to every unit and everybody is talking about COVID-19. It really makes you panic, and it brings a lot of depression and uncertainty. But at the same time, just knowing that I work for Memorial Hermann and knowing all that they've done to help stabilize and neu- tralize the situation, gives me that hope to wake up every day and go to work. —Kwame Bennam, RCP, RRT, as told to TMC Pulse writer and columnist Shanley Pierce

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