Free COVID-19 Telemedicine and Triage System for Healthcare Organizations

With the World Health Organization declaring the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic and governments around the world taking increasingly drastic measures to reduce its spread, communities are becoming anxious about the outbreak and health systems are being overwhelmed. The United States healthcare system has not seen a more uncertain time in recent history.

On March 9th, in collaboration with several health systems across the United States, Memora Health launched a free, text-based triage and tracking system for hospitals to keep their communities informed and restart non-COVID care as soon as possible.

Health systems are able to proactively conduct screenings of patients in their communities — anonymously and for free —using SMS. Depending on the number of risk factors that individuals have, we are able to forward them to a free telemedicine service, powered by Ro, if they have more than one risk factor. At health systems with their own telemedicine services, we are able to forward patients to these internal services. Individuals do not need to download an app or log in to a portal, making this a frictionless method for accessing up-to-date information on COVID-19.

Specifically in times like this, eliminating barriers to care and information is critical. SMS is able to do this substantially better than web or app-based services, in a secure way.

Text ‘COVID’ to +1–623–428–0201 to try it out.

Sample interactions from patients using the Memora COVID-19 triage system

We are actively working with health systems to fully digitize their triage pathways for COVID-19, tailoring our system to the needs of each system and their communities. To-date, several hundreds of thousands of people across the United States can access this service and it is positively impacting the fight against COVID-19:

• Care navigation: Memora has helped health systems divert large volumes of low-risk people away from their emergency rooms and to telehealth services that can answer their questions and conduct preliminary triage of their symptoms. In cases where someone has multiple risk factors, we are guiding them to nearby testing centers. This has helped reduce the burden that ERs are seeing as COVID-19 testing becomes more accessible.
• Contact tracing: Through detailed data collection on who has tested positive or had exposure to COVID-19, Memora is able to track interactions and locations that these individuals have been to in a way that respects privacy. Contrary to many background services that are collecting location data without permission, our system prioritizes privacy and requires individuals to self-report any data that is being collected.
• Load balancing: By collecting valuable data on zip codes with higher volumes of symptomatic reports, our team is coordinating with federally qualified health centers and state and federal government agencies to help them determine optimal resource allocation for personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing kits, while also guiding individuals to testing sites in proportional volume.
• Fighting misinformation: With several conflicting sources of information about COVID across the internet and social media websites, many people are confused as to what they should believe. Memora aggregates information from the CDC, WHO, and state-level public health agencies on COVID-19 to assure that people have a reliable source of truth.
• Reducing anxiety: In exceedingly uncertain times, Memora’s service is helping to keep people educated and reduce anxiety around COVID-19 while also helping individuals take the necessary safety precautions to reduce the spread and stay healthy.

Our team is excited to share two key insights from our work thus far:

I. Information Gaps

Across all the interactions that people have had on our system, specific to COVID-19, we’ve identified themes on which questions are commonly asked and what information is unclear to the large majority of people. Having analyzed several hundreds of thousands of datapoints, our team has identified the top 5 most commonly asked questions that people have for their providers regarding COVID-19:

1. What are the symptoms of COVID? (45.04%)
2. I want to get tested (32.68%)
3. What is coronavirus? (27.77%)
4. Who qualifies to get tested? (21.76%)
5. What should I do to stay safe? (14.90%)

Furthermore, we have seen that 12.4% of all people using our service report at least one symptom that they think is related to coronavirus. The frequency with which various symptoms are being reported includes:

Symptom frequency for patients reporting at least one symptom related to COVID-19

Our team is working with several companies and federal and state agencies to utilize this data to determine ways to fill information gaps that currently exist in various communities across the United States.

II. Inconsistent Triage Pathways

Interestingly, across several health systems we have worked with over the past several weeks, we have seen varying symptoms being screened for as indicators of COVID-19. Of all triage pathways our team has digitized, the frequency with which symptoms are screened for include:

Frequency of Screened Symptoms in SARS-CoV-2 Triage Pathways (n=21)

It’s clear from these variations that our system, along with interventions from many other healthcare technology companies, can be used to aggregate data on symptoms that ought to be screened for, helping to standardize the risk factors that care teams assess.

In addition, Memora has released additional services to help healthcare organizations fight COVID-19, including:

• A system for text-based screenings of physicians and hospital workers for indications of (1) COVID-19 symptoms, and (2) burnout
• Access to data for public health agencies to better understand public perception, how the disease is spreading, and symptom frequency
• Text-based care management and education programs for non-COVID patients, receiving care from health systems, on changes to their care plan and how to stay healthy
• Video visits and phone calls, along with corresponding documentation, that can now be conducted directly from the Memora system to enable billing of new telemedicine codes that have been released.

In these uncertain times, it has been inspiring to see the healthcare industry collaborate and support each other in a way that we haven’t seen before. Thank you to the front-line health system workers, physicians, surgeons, residents, nurses, medical assistants, and all other healthcare practitioners for their sacrifice and bravery in tackling COVID-19.

If the work of our team can be helpful to your organization, please reach out here or email us directly at info@memorahealth.com. We can help manage the overwhelming volume you are currently seeing and deploy a free telemedicine, triage, or messaging system within 48 hours.

Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.