Using Advanced Clinical Surveillance Software to Fight COVID-19

In view of the rapid moving COVID-19 healthcare crisis, DSS is in a unique position to support the 45 VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) that have the TheraDoc software in place. TheraDoc is DSS’ industry leading software decision support tool that provides real-time electronic clinical surveillance for antimicrobial stewardship and infectious disease treatment.

TheraDoc is a sophisticated data mining tool, that allows cross stratification of different data points as patient conditions change in real-time, to provide information to healthcare providers on targeted populations. In other words, it’s the perfect tool to help Veterans as the COVID-19 continues to evolve daily.

VA staff are overwhelmed trying to keep up with the CDC’s changing requirements for COVID-19. DSS has worked with our partner, Premier, to develop and deliver custom, standardized COVID-19 surveillance alerts and reports to all VAMCs using TheraDoc. As potentially infected patients seek care, or employees come and go in their job responsibilities, these alerts and surveillance tools will be in place to assist VA clinicians.

Some of the alerting and surveillance includes:

• Real-time alerting for all COVID-19 results and the ability to stratify data for assessment and trend analysis.

• Notification whenever a patient is admitted to the hospital within 14 days of a negative collected test.

• Criteria for removing patients from isolation are captured by TheraDoc. This ensures hospital beds and equipment are freed up for others as soon as multiple confirmatory tests are available. 

• VAs that are screening employees and healthcare providers can use TheraDoc to track which employees have received multiple confirmatory negative test results from oral and nasopharyngeal sources, ensuring they are safe to deliver patient care.

• Proactive tracking of patients with positive chest x-rays with no positive respiratory symptoms.

This demonstrates the benefit to VAMC’s working with a leader in infection control and surveillance, such as DSS/TheraDoc, who can immediately respond to crises such as this, and quickly deliver customized surveillance to positively affect patient care.  These functions need to be standardized throughout the entire VA system so every facility can receive such proactive updates. More VAMCs need to adopt TheraDoc so that every Veteran can benefit from enhanced care interventions.

In the face of COVID-19, the VA can be in the vanguard of the fight against this pandemic and set an example for American healthcare. We are proud to be providing sophisticated surveillance assistance for better Veteran care during this crisis. 

To learn more about TheraDoc, please click here.