Montgomery County and Real Time Medical Systems have teamed up to provide 24/7 electronic Infectious Disease Surveillance of nursing facilities in the county to help detect COVID-19 cases more quickly. However only nursing facilities that have volunteered to share their data are part of the program.

The cloud-based software pulls data from the electronic health records and uses it to identify potential infectious disease “hotspots.”

The system detects warning signs of the infectious disease by searching for changes in temperature, respiratory rate, cough, diagnosis, and shortness of breath.

“By having automated, early access to all of today’s medical information we hope to be able to identify outbreaks days earlier,” said Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, Chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners.

The software protects individual data and provides only facility-level information to the county. In addition to the raw data, the software will pair up various pieces of information from electronic health records to provide interventional analytics and identify nursing facilities with potential problems early.

“By identifying a problem within a facility early, we can focus limited resources and equipment and we hope save lives of patients and staff,” said Arkoosh.