Bright.md COVID-19 Screening Products Help Save Thousands of Provider Hours During Pandemic Crisis

PORTLAND, Ore., March 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As COVID-19 has spread to every state in the U.S. and increased testing reveals exponential growth in the number of infected patients, Bright.md has helped health systems evaluate and treat tens of thousands of patients with its virtual care delivery platform, SmartExamtm. Allowing patients to be clinically managed from their own homes reduces the spread of the virus and, more importantly, gives valuable time back to providers to focus on the patients who need the most care.

As of Friday morning, Bright.md's partner health systems have:

• Screened more than 27,000 patients with possible COVID-19 infection.
• Escalated more than 425 patients who have met Centers for Disease Control (CDC) criteria for further care or testing.
• Saved providers more than 8,000 care delivery hours.

Using SmartExam, providers can deliver a diagnosis and treatment in less than two minutes, which means a single clinician can manage more than 200 patients each day. For comparison, in-person and video visits typically require more than 20 minutes of provider time, which means a single doctor has capacity for only 25 to 50 patient encounters each day, even when taking on exceptionally long shifts.

"Overwhelmed health workers on the front lines of the global COVID-19 pandemic are working long hours to treat the growing number of patients who require screening and care for the virus," said Dr. Ray Costantini, co-founder and CEO of Bright.md. "By enabling at-home online care automation, we are seeing the number of patients accessing our services multiply exponentially each day, which means fewer patients will expose others to the virus and providers have more time to address the most serious cases."

Bright.md?recognized this week by CB Insights as one of 12 healthcare technology companies on the forefront of addressing the COVID-19 crisis?has also announced a suite of products to help systems manage the demand on their clinical resources:

• Free COVID-19 Screening Tool: Last week, Bright.md made available a free COVID-19 screening tool based on its virtual care platform, SmartExam, which can be deployed in a few days, to hospitals nationwide.
• SmartExam Light COVID-19 + URI Care: A streamlined version of SmartExam that includes the COVID-19 Screening Tool, as well as the Upper Respiratory Infection (URI) module, which allows hospitals to screen for COVID-19 and deliver care in the case of more common upper respiratory infections (e.g., flu). This tool can be deployed in one to two weeks.
• SmartExam: Bright.md's flagship virtual care tool that helps deliver remote care for more than 450 conditions that drive more than 60% of primary- and urgent-care volume first integrated the COVID-19 assessment into its URI module in late January. 

Dozens of health systems already overwhelmed with patients have contacted Bright.md to deploy these digital triage tools in the next two weeks. Bright.md's dedicated COVID-19 team is continuously monitoring the evolving CDC guidelines about COVID-19 screening, updating all products within one business day.

Bright.md's SmartExam is also still helping systems deliver care to people who have more mainstream medical issues, such as pink eye and bladder infections. "People have real concerns about going to the doctor right now, but non-acute conditions don't just go away during a pandemic," said Dr. Costantini. "If we can help healthcare systems keep those patients out of their doctors' offices by offering them high-quality evidence-based virtual care, their clinicians can attend to the sickest patients. It's a powerful way to help flatten the curve of COVID-19 impact."

In addition to its recognition by CB Insights this week, Bright.md also banded together with nearly 40 other health tech companies to form the StartX Med COVID-19 Task Force, a group mobilized to provide government agencies, regulatory boards and healthcare systems with solutions for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the novel coronavirus.

Dr. Costantini will be available for interviews and to share his insights with the industry on effectively deploying telehealth solutions and managing patient demand during global health crises.  

For more information, hospital systems can email [email protected] or visit www.bright.md.

About SmartExam
SmartExam can support care for the conditions that account for up to 60% of the visit volume in primary care, urgent care, retail and non-emergent emergency department (ED) settings. The AI-powered asynchronous care automation tool helps providers achieve up to 20x improvements in efficiency, reducing a 20+ minute in-person or video-based appointment to under 90 seconds.

About Bright.md
Founded in 2014 and based in Portland, Oregon, Bright.md is a leading healthcare automation company dedicated to modernizing direct-to-patient telehealth for healthcare systems with its AI-powered virtual-care platform, SmartExam. Bright.md partners with premier healthcare organizations in North America, including three of the top five not-for-profit health systems and five of the top ten health systems in the United States. These partners offer SmartExam to more than 10 million patients who are seeking convenient urgent and primary care online. Bright.md has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Healthcare, a Vendor to Watch by Chilmark Research, and is the preferred choice of AVIA's Virtual Access cohort. Bright.md is venture-backed by B Capital Group, Seven Peaks Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Oregon Venture Fund and the Stanford-StartX Fund. For more information, visit Bright.md.

SOURCE Bright.md