Originally published on home.kpmg.
Technology architecture is designed to connect recovered patients with current patients participating in clinical trials — Data & analytics can provide insight to healthcare and government decision makers
Recognizing the need for technologies to help advance the response and recovery to the COVID-19 pandemic, KPMG LLP has built the technology architecture for a solution that can match patients in clinical trials for convalescent plasma therapy to recovered patients willing to donate their antibodies.
“KPMG has a unique opportunity to support our communities, government entities and healthcare providers in a challenging time by leveraging our experience to automate complex processes, provide analytics and help facilitate the study of convalescent plasma for the critically ill,” said Cliff Justice, principal and U.S. leader, Digital Capabilities, at KPMG LLP, the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm.
The solution can also provide healthcare and government decision makers with a dashboard by geography to track COVID-19 testing and results. This information can give government officials the necessary insights about the need for social distancing and the resumption of commerce.
KPMG’s solution has been designed to make the plasma donation process easier and more efficient by automating the complex tasks and logistics associated with the data collection, qualification and matching process by performing statistical analytics, and using artificial intelligence (AI) and virtualized data. It is designed to integrate third-party data from blood banks, hospitals and diagnostic labs, and work with data backbones and existing technology applications that are already in place, such as IT infrastructure owned by governments and hospitals.
“This solution is designed to help ease the burden on plasma donors, accelerate the COVID-19 plasma donation process and provide better visibility to health authorities, while helping facilitate the study of convalescent plasma,” said Bharat Rao, PhD, principal and leader of Data and Analytics for healthcare & life sciences at KPMG. “With the use of a mobile app, the data is better organized in a secure format, and reduces the duplication of requests and administrative overhead among healthcare organizations.”
Other features of the technology architecture, which can be built and deployed as a mobile app, include:
- Aiding donor recruitment by helping collect information from those who have recovered.
- Serving as a registry to connect recovered patients with those patients participating in clinical trials or those receiving the experimental treatment under an expanded access program.
- Capturing clinical progression data to improve the patient qualification and matching.
In addition to matching patients with COVID-19 antibody donors, the solution can be deployed for monitoring vaccine use when one is available, to help policymakers with population health and social distancing measures, and can be integrated with an entity’s contact tracing efforts.
The solution is intended to be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which sets a legal standard for patient privacy. The convalescent plasma therapy matching technology architecture is a component of KPMG’s recently announced “Restarting America” initiative to help organizations reopen workplaces.
“Beyond a humanitarian toll, COVID-19 has posed a multitude of challenges for businesses,” KPMG Principal Atif Zaim said. “Emerging technologies can be applied to help decision makers with a number of complex problems. Helping healthcare organizations with this challenge of researching treatment options is instrumental to helping repair societies damaged by coronavirus and resuming normal business.”
Additional details can be found here: https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2020/fighting-covid-19.html
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