A healthcare analytics firm hopes to steer providers to the best therapies for COVID-19 patients of varying ages and medical problems by breaking down patient responses to four different treatments.
“Because it’s real, live data streaming in, what individual physicians or hospitals or public policy individuals can do is be able to make judgments in their area for clinical purposes and what they see happening in their patients that are taking these particular treatments,” said Dr. William Kirsh, chief medical information officer at the firm Agilum Healthcare Intelligence.
Agilum worked with pharmacists at New York University Langone Hospital who devised four different medication combinations that patients of different ages and genders could receive to treat and possibly to cure them of COVID-19. NYU Langone has been the “quarterback” of Agilum’s data collection process, according to the firm’s CEO, Travis Leonardi.
After NYU chose four treatment regimens for physicians to try, Agilum collected over 17,000 patient responses from about 11% of U.S. hospitals, showing which treatments worked best for men and which worked best for women. Patient groups were further broken down into those with and without health conditions that could increase the severity of coronavirus infection.
The antimalarial medications, hydroxychloroquine and its relative, chloroquine, led to the greatest number of patients who survived the virus and were able to leave the hospital. About 87.6% of female patients treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, along with the antibiotic azithromycin, survived, and 84.7% of male patients on that same regimen survived.
The Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to hydroxychloroquine manufacturers, which allows the medication to be “donated to the Strategic National Stockpile to be distributed and prescribed by doctors” but does not require clinical trials to prove it works.
Fauci, said positive results are merely “anecdotal” while also trying to convey that he and the president were on the same page. “The president feels optimistic about something. His feeling about it. … What I’m saying is, it might be effective,” he said.
Some of hydroxychloroquine’s promise as a treatment for the coronavirus comes from research about its effectiveness in treating the two most recent widespread coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, in 2003 and 2012, respectively.
“At that point in time, there was a consideration in how you would treat [SARS and MERS],” Kirsh said. “There was a body of literature around the use of chloroquine, and so, it looked like, although anecdotal, the result was positive in the population, although small population, that received it.”
Trump has directed the FDA to work as fast as possible to bring treatments to market, and chloroquine is the leading candidate. He announced in a March 19 White House briefing that the FDA is “slashing all of the red tape” so it can speed up the process of finding a cure.
Time is of the essence, and Agilum analysts hope that having survivability data on hand will help healthcare providers narrow down possible treatments that could increase a patient’s chance of recovering and decrease the stay in the hospital for fewer than two weeks.
Agilum’s goal, Leonardi said, is to provide physicians with observational data to show trends of what treatment combinations are working for different patient populations. As healthcare workers begin trying different combinations until a coronavirus cure is identified, Agilum will update its data.
“What you will see over time is that there will be other protocols because physicians will try different treatments across the United States,” Kirsh said. “As we see those protocols develop, we will add that to our data so that everyone gets to see the benefits or what doesn’t work.”
See the original article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/healthcare-analytics-could-provide-a-blueprint-for-coronavirus-treatments