Intel Program Offers 100 Hospitals Free Virtual ICU Software For 90 Days

The semiconductor giant is working with health-care software provider Medical Informatics to help hospitals quickly upgrade acute care beds into intensive care unit beds that can be remotely monitored at scale in response to challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

A new Intel program is offering 100 hospitals three months of free software that can turn acute care beds into monitored intensive care unit beds in a matter of minutes.

The Scale to Serve program, formed in partnership between Intel and health-care software provider Medical Informatics, is meant to address the need for higher ICU capacity and to help protect front-line health-care workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

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The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker unveiled the new program Wednesday as part of its $50 million pandemic response tech fund, which has also earmarked funding for an online learning initiative targeting underserved communities and other health-care projects.

For 100 qualifying hospitals, Intel said it would fund the implementation fees of Medical Informatics' virtual ICU software, called Sickbay, while Medical Informatics will waive software subscription licensing fees for the first three months.

The Sickbay platform allows health-care providers to remotely monitor up to 100 patients in a single "virtual ICU" interface from any web-enabled device while bringing in data from multiple medical devices, such as ventilators and cardiac monitors from different vendors.

Intel said the Sickbay platform, which is being rolled out on servers running Intel Xeon processors, addresses the challenge of fetching and integrating patient data that is tied to medical devices in proprietary formats. It can also help hospitals make use of health-care workers who are coming out of retirement or are in quarantine, thanks to Sickbay's remote capabilities.

Houston Medical Hospital in Texas has already rolled out Sickbay, according to Intel, with the ability to monitor as many as 180 COVID-19 patients remotely. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital is also expanding its ICU capacity with Sickbay.

"Intel technology has a role to help accelerate the core capabilities our medical community requires to combat COVID-19," said Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Xeon and Memory Group, in a statement. "This is why we’re committed to applying our technology to helping protect our front-line health-care providers who are providing care for ICU patients by accelerating the access to virtual patient monitoring solutions."