June 30, 2020 | Download PDF
This past April, TATRC, in collaboration with the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC), issued a Request for Project Proposals (RPP), and subsequently, nine awards for a new national tele-critical care program.
In support of the COVID-19 response, the goal of this new program is to aid in the rapid development, deployment and testing of the National Emergency Tele-critical Care Network (NETCCN) - a cloud-based, low-resource, stand-alone health information management system for the creation and coordination of flexible and extendable “virtual critical care wards.” These high acuity, virtual wards will bring high-quality critical care capability to nearly every bedside, be it a healthcare facility, field hospital, or gymnasium. Based on cellular communication networks, mobile technologies and cloud computing, NETCCN will support the extension of high-quality intensive care to traditional (i.e. critical access hospitals and clinics) and non-traditional and temporary healthcare facilities (i.e. field hospitals and gymnasiums) which lack adequate critical care expertise and resources necessary for care of COVID-19-related illnesses.
“COVID-19 presents a situation where critical care resources can be overwhelmed by patient volume. Even if enough equipment is made available, there are not enough critical care trained clinicians to manage all of the critically ill patients during a national emergency, especially in rural and austere locations. The NETCCN project seeks to deliver this capability from anywhere to anywhere leveraging our existing mobile networks,” said COL Jeremy Pamplin, TATRC Director.:
Through a step-wise approach, the NETCCN project will fund an initial Phase 1 cohort of nine teams consisting of healthcare organizations and technology vendors to rapidly, iteratively and collaboratively prototype, test and refine tele-critical care and data visualization solutions to support local, regional and ultimately national COVID-19 care and situational awareness.
Phase 1 of the NETCCN project consisted of a 15-day sprint in which teams conducted initial system configuration and alpha testing. Teams that successfully complete this phase may move forward to Phase 2 of the project, which is another 15-day sprint of rapid development and beta testing of the platforms with healthcare providers and patients. Teams who successfully complete Phase 2 of the project, may move to Phase 3, in which teams will field their platforms to actual users and experience real world use at scale. Through the MTEC, Other Transaction Authority (OTA), TATRC awarded the following nine teams for Phase 1 of the NETCCN project, which commenced on June 15, 2020:
NETCCN Phase I Teams:
MTEC is an enterprise partnership in collaboration with industry and academia to facilitate research and development activities, in cooperation with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) and other DoD agencies in the biomedical sciences (including but not limited to drugs, biologics, vaccines, medical software and medical devices) to protect, treat and optimize the health and performance of U.S. military personnel.
Please stay tuned for our Quarter 4 edition of the TATRC Times for details regarding significant updates on Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the NETCCN initiative!
This article was published in the October 2020 issue of the TATRC Times.