The goal of the tool is to have a place for Oregon residents to go for information that might help them decide what steps to take given the circumstances, and most importantly, to keep the lid on unnecessary 911 calls, urgent care visits and visits to emergency rooms.
“The real important piece is we’re able to keep our emergency lanes—our 911 system, our ambulances and our emergency rooms—open for the sickest patients, which is the true goal of the whole program,” said Portland Fire and Rescue Lt. Rich Chatman, who initially collaborated with a local doctor to bring the technology to Oregon. Chatman and Dr. Jonathan Jui worked with Dr. Justin Schrager, an emergency room physician at Emory University Hospital in Georgia and co-founder of Vital Software, which developed the tool.
So far, Portland and Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties have signed up. Fees range from $1,500 to $5,000, depending on population.
The model for this was developed in 2009 in response to the H1N1 virus and it took a little more than three weeks to tweak it for the coronavirus and customize it for Oregon.
“Obviously the coronavirus is different, but they’re both influenza-like illnesses, so we took that algorithm from 10 years ago, which had been independently validated by the public and worked with the same experts to redesign the algorithm for the coronavirus,” Schrager said. “Basically we picked it up off the shelf and worked on building on c19.com and were able to go from start to finish in about three and a half weeks.”
One of the challenges people around the country have had when confronting the coronavirus is where to get reliable information, and this site helps solve that problem. “It’s an educational tool,” Schrager said. “It doesn’t tell you whether you have coronavirus.It just tells you what to do regardless of whether you have it or not. It gives you information about your symptoms being related to coronavirus and tells you the next step.”
The site provides an “order” of what to do in certain circumstances, such as shortness of breath, cough or chest pains, and errs on the side of being conservative. “Because it’s a website and I’m not sitting here watching every user and intervening asking, ‘What do you really mean by shortness of breath?” Schrager said.
It might instruct a healthy person with mild symptoms to stay home and not engage the health-care system unless it’s absolutely necessary. “That’s the problem they had in New York,” Schrager said. “They had a surge of health-care utilization that was overwhelming. They had a lot of sick people, but they also had a lot of moderately sick people who probably should have just stayed home instead of calling 911 or their doctors.”
The site also helps local health officials collect data that aids in locating where clusters of coronavirus cases may be and where additional resources may be needed.
We’re able to run a lot of analytics in the background so we can tell what fraction of users are reporting severe emergency symptoms like shortness of breath or chest pains,” Schrager said. “The EMS community can really dig into the data and detect trends over time from demographics and age of the people using it.”
