Australia, Sydney: 16 December 2020: IBM (NYSE) and the COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium have made available an app to help clinicians in intensive care units globally access the most up-to-date medical information customised to the profiles of their own critically ill COVID-19 patients.

IBM has developed the app as part of its work with the COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium (COVID Critical), a global alliance of healthcare professionals and researchers led by a team based at Brisbane’s Prince Charles Hospital. The app will be made available to more than 500 clinicians at over 370 hospitals around the world and runs on the secure and open IBM Cloud.

As a COVID Critical partner, IBM worked with medical researchers and data scientists at The University of Queensland with support from Queensland University of Technology to develop the app, taking advice from clinicians within COVID Critical’s 54 member countries.

IBM Australia Managing Director, Katrina Troughton, said: “We are incredibly proud to be a partner of COVID Critical and hope that our technology will help clinicians on the front line soon.

“Following an initial pilot in Australia and the United States, the application is expected to be made available to COVID Critical clinicians based at member sites across six continents - we anticipate that the global interest could result in up to 6000 clinicians signing up to use it in the coming months.

“The web-based app was built by seven IBM designers and developers in Australia and New Zealand over the course of seven weeks runs on IBM Cloud. We deliberately developed the app using a web-based browser to ensure it can be used on mobile devices and tablets – making it more accessible to clinicians around the world and on the go. By running it on IBM Cloud, private clinical data can be protected by its industy-leading security capabilities,¹” Ms Troughton said.

COVID Critical founder Professor John Fraser said: “At the start of 2020, when COVID-19 was not yet well-known globally, we knew we urgently needed to share and accumulate information because clinicians on the frontline had nothing: no training or textbooks about how to fight this virus in critical care.

“Our Consortium members told IBM that they needed a tool to allow them to consider key clinical features, including a range of pulmonary, cardiological, neurological and renal measures, as well as the use of mechanical ventilation and ECMO (artificial heart/lung machine), duration of stay in ICU, and survival rates.

“This new web-based app will potentially provide them with the evidence and information they need to save lives. We are particularly excited for the difference this will make to our colleagues fighting this pandemic in low and middle-income countries, with limited resources and support. It could be a game-changer and a life-saver.”

The COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium study is led by the Critical Care Research Group, based at The University of Queensland and The Prince Charles Hospital. It is supported by The Prince Charles Hospital Foundation, Wesley Medical Research, Queensland Health and ISARIC (International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium).