(Swedish Image)

Microsoft and Swedish Health Services joined forces over the past two weeks to build an app that helps hospital staff monitor resources for COVID-19-related care.

Swedish, the largest nonprofit health provider in the Seattle-area, unveiled the COVID-19 Emergency Response (CERA) app Wednesday. Frontline hospital workers use mobile devices to keep track of COVID-19 patients, protective gear, ventilator use, and other coronavirus-related information. The app syncs with hospital dashboards to help Swedish leaders gauge activity at its five care facilities, two emergency departments, and units in critical areas.

The CERA app already helped clinicians convert a post-anesthesia room into an additional Intensive Care Unit. More than 400 Swedish clinicians are using the app.

“This near real-time view of quickly changing data is empowering Swedish to better prepare for a COVID-19 surge and better manage the needs of our patients and caregivers,” Kevin Brooks, chief operating officer at Swedish First Hill and co-developer of the CERA app, said in a statement. 

Like many hospitals systems across the world, Swedish is struggling to keep up with the increasing number of COVID-19 patients, Crosscut reported last week.

As it worked with Swedish, Microsoft saw an opportunity to help other healthcare organizations manage effective communication. The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant released a Power Platform emergency response solution last week.

Anyone can download the software and track their resources, whether it’s keeping monitoring of scarce supplies like ventilators and masks, or collecting additional information on what hospitals may need.

“Managing bed count and inventory of critical supplies and sharing this information with others in the region enables appropriate allocation of critical resources,” Dr. David Rhew, vice president and chief medical officer at Microsoft, said in a statement. “In this time of crisis, sharing of timely and accurate information saves lives.”

Microsoft has been rolling out other resources in the fight against the global pandemic. Last month it worked with the CDC on a Healthcare Bot service that acts as a self-screening tool for people wondering if they may need treatment for COVID-19.

The company is also tracking information about the outbreak. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, a project launched in cooperation with Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and other partners, aims to make high-quality information about coronavirus more accessible to researchers.

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