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Chosen by the emergency doctors who headed the project. Sats being the more important. Those are default thresholds, but each they can be overridden per-patient.

As I understand it there is a lot of communication going between emergency teams and specialists around the world and the odd pre-publication paper. This work has come out of the RMH's emergency department. Full credit goes to Dr Martin Dutch who's idea the whole thing was. As best I know he came to the idea (tracking sats via cheap electronics to spot risky covid patients) quite early, and independently. He also built an initial prototype. I'm a developer who was brought in to build it out into a working system during the first phase of Australia's covid outbreak.

PS: If you're thinking about using the system, it's worth having a read through the redcap_design_overview.md documentation. Building something like this in a research-survey tool was not easy and there's plenty of things in the design that will be head-scratchers when seen for the first time. Now that the model is proven we'll hopefully build out a 'real' version of it at some point.

We're happy to assist where we can to see other hospitals (particularly resource-constrained ones) pick it up. The operating costs are very low (a server + sms gateway cost). The hospital has also open sourced some other covid tools developed this year.



What other tools did the hospital open source this year?


There is a tool for screening patients as they arrive at the hospital. This has been running at a number of facilities this year.

https://github.com/rmhcovid/screentool

And we have another project for operating drive-through testing clinics that will hopefully be published in the next few weeks. It has been shared through hospital channels but isn’t up on github yet.


bearsnowstorm, I just had a chance to read your background. If you or your department is interested in talking with our emergency specialists by all means say hello.




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