COVID-19: How CHIBE Is Making A Difference
CHIBE faculty and staff have been busy working on a variety of projects to help patients, clinicians, and health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are just a few of the projects they are involved in:
A COVID-19 Chatbot for FAQs
A Penn team led by CHIBE’s Roy Rosin, MBA, and Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD, and a team from Google have created an AI chatbot to help answer common questions related to COVID-19. This chatbot helps offload call volume from Penn Medicine’s phone lines to unburden our clinicians and shorten wait times for patients, while also making it faster and easier to find answers whether you’re a nurse managing the hotline or an anxious patient seeking accurate information. Soon, this chatbot will expand to assess symptoms and triage patients to make sure they are routed to the most appropriate clinical intake level. An open-source version of the chatbot will be made available to other health systems through Google for free.
COVID-19 Watch Monitoring Program
The Way to Health team created COVID-19 Watch, a way to monitor low to moderate risk patients at home more safely so that they do not need to present in person, nor have to have home care workers visit their homes. Patients whose symptoms are concerning will be automatically escalated to receive clinical support allowing our clinicians to focus their attention where it is most needed.
Pregnancy Watch
The Way to Health team also created Pregnancy Watch, which is similar to COVID-19 Watch but dedicated to soon-to-be-mothers. This service helps monitor pregnant patients for symptoms. Automated texts are sent twice a day, and patients can be connected to OB/GYN providers if their symptoms worsen.
CHIME Modeling Tool
CHIBE members were involved in developing a modeling tool — COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model (CHIME) — that can inform preparations for capacity strain during the early days of a pandemic. Read more in Annals of Internal Medicine and this LDI article by Gary E. Weissman, MD, MSHP, and find the publicly available tool here: https://penn-chime.phl.io/.