VIRONIX: REMOTE SCREENING, MONITORING, AND TRIAGE OF VIRAL RESPIRATORY ILLNESS

ABSTRACT

TOPIC Chest Infections TYPE Original Investigations PURPOSE: Viral Respiratory illnesses such as Covid-19 and Influenza pose significant health challenges worldwide. There are more than 150M confirmed cases of Covid-19 with a reported 3.15M deaths (as of April, 2021). The WHO reports there to be ~ 1 billion influenza cases and 290-650K influenza-associated deaths annually. A signature feature of these illnesses is an early infection period that, if insufficiently recognized and controlled early, can lead to viral spread and avoidable morbidity/mortality. The need for personalized, remote care tools that facilitate early detection and triage of viral illness has never been greater. To address this gap, we developed an institutional software, Vironix, that uses machine-learned (ML) prediction models to enable real-time risk stratification and decision support for global organizations. METHODS: ML models were trained on clinical characteristic data from East and South Asia, Western Europe, and USA. Algorithms take an input of symptom, profile, biometric, and exposure data and return an assessment of disease severity. Covid-19 algorithms were validated on computer generated patient vigenttes and deployed in the Vironix web app among 22 participants in a small business commercial pilot for member self-screening. Members conducted daily health assessments and received personalized decision support while organization managers received work-from-home recommendations and compliant symptom monitoring without seeing member health data. For influenza, Vironix ML algorithms were tested on a dataset (with a 90/10 train test split) collected from one academic and two community emergency rooms from March 2014 to July 2017 (Hong et al.). RESULTS: ML-predictions showed 87.6% accuracy, 85.5% sensitivity, and 87.8% specificity in identifying severe Covid-19 presentations in an out-of-sample validation set of 5,000 patient cases. After 4-months pilot use, Vironix issued 14 stay-at-home and 10 healthcare escalation recommendations while maintaining 30-day and 7-day user retention of 66% and 72%, greatly exceeding common app adoption rates. ML predictions for the Influenza data set showed 67.8% accuracy, 71.7% sensitivity, and 65.4% specificity in identifying admissible or dischargeable presentations of influenza in an out-of-sample validation set of 56,000 patient cases. CONCLUSIONS: Covid-19 ML-severity assessments showed strong accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity in identifying severe clinical presentations. The deployed web-app showed high adoption with members receiving relevant decision support. Flu algorithm performance could be bolstered by inclusion of biometric features. Additional controlled trials could be conducted to establish validated markers of health improvement and early illness detection resulting from Vironix use. The overall methodology for mapping clinical characteristic data into patient scenarios for training ML classifiers of health deterioration is generalizable for a variety of potential software and hardware deployments across disease spaces. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The technology detailed in this study represents a potential low cost, scalable, hardware/software agnostic, global solution for early detection and intervention on infectious respiratory illness. These solutions can be integrated into remote care and institutional wellness workflows to support public health initiatives. DISCLOSURES No relevant relationships by Anna Berryman, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Shreyas Iyer, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Vinay Konda, source=Web Response Advisory Committee Member relationship with ABMRCC Please note $1-$1000 by Chris Landon, source=Web Response, value=Consulting fee Removed 04/28/2021 by Chris Landon, source=Web Response Consultant relationship with ABM Respiratory Please note 11/20 - date Added 04/30/2021 by Chris Landon, source=Web Response, value=Consulting fee no disclosure on file for Nicholas Mark;No relevant relationships by James Morrill, source=Web R sponse No relevant relationships by Sriram Ramanathan, source=Web Response Owner/Founder relationship with Vironix Health, Inc Please note 05/2020 - Present Added 04/28/2021 by Sumanth Swaminathan, source=Web Response, value=Ownership interest Owner/Founder relationship with Vironix Health Please note 04/2020-Now Added 05/10/2021 by Botros Toro, source=Web Response, value=Ownership interest Consultant relationship with Vironix Please note 2019-present Added 04/28/2021 by Nicholas Wysham, source=Web Response, value=Ownership interest