The Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for US hospitals to employ an Israeli-made system that alerts doctors eight hours before COVID-19 patients’ conditions deteriorate, according to a report.

The hospital system made by CLEW — a company based in Netanya that predicts life-threatening medical complications — has helped to keep the computer and telemedicine networks at two major Israeli hospitals running during the coronavirus pandemic, the Times of Israel reported.

CEO Gal Salomon said his company’s system is the only FDA-cleared one that provides early warning on patients who are likely to experience respiratory failure or blood complications associated with the deadly illness.

“Healthcare providers need more than simple analytics. Systems need to integrate into the provider’s workflow, offering ease of use and actionable data,” Salomon said in a press release.

“The CLEWICU platform is designed to enable healthcare providers to monitor patient predicted risk levels across all units in real-time allowing for smart decision making about clinical resource allocation, ensuring prompt, proactive and efficient patient care,” he added.

The system draws on records from thousands of COVID-19 patients — mostly in the US — whose data was analyzed by CLEW, using artificial intelligence to find out what changes take place in patients hours before they take a turn for the worse.

CLEW’s TeleICU PlatformCLEW Medical

The FDA approval comes with physicians requiring artificial intelligence more than ever because they have limited ability to draw on their experience with the novel coronavirus, Salomon told the news outlet.

“Normally, doctors try to use their knowledge and experience, but they don’t have experience — they didn’t study COVID-19 in medical school,” he told the Times of Israel.

“The fact that our system allows you to deal with data, which is hard evidence, is very powerful. It means that they can work on the basis of correlations and patterns,” Salomon added about the software suite that is installed in a hospital’s computers to manage data for all patients, not just those with COVID-19.

“We have built a system that will have physicians getting better decisions on patients, and the fact we have so much data is a paradigm shift that the medical profession has been waiting for years to get,” he said.

The system has been deployed on a research basis in five US hospitals for 10 months, according to the news outlet.



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