The EDAS system provides a reliable prediction of infectious disease's causative agent, upon first patient encounter with a physician, with no physical examination. The system will have multiple effects on healthcare systems:
• Allowing remote treatment of respiratory infectious diseases, thus keeping infecting patients away from medical centers and optimizing treatment delivery and costs.
• Reducing overuse of antibiotics by 30% thus contributing to global antimicrobial stewardship targets to reduce antimicrobial resistance.
• Reducing unnecessary lab tests by 35%, thus allowing better economics and better use of resources.
• Reducing unnecessary hospitalization days by 15%, thus contributing to the efficiency of healthcare delivery organizations.
With these effects, the EDAS system will impact the global healthcare system:
• Patients – With a rapid correct diagnosis, patients will be subjected to less unneeded antibiotics leading to significantly better treatments. Patients will have a shorter hospital stay or shorter physician visit time, which will also lower their chance to be infected by additional pathogens such as MRSA (very common in hospitals). Furthermore, patients will also be able to use a telemedicine service for respiratory diseases, eliminating the need to go to a hospital or clinic.
• Physicians – The EDAS system will assist physicians in optimizing their diagnosis, rapidly, which will lower the rate of treatment changes and results with fewer return visits at the primary care and fewer hospitalization days.
• Health Delivery Organizations and Insurers – By lowering the above-mentioned factors (e.g. overuse of antibiotics, unnecessary lab tests and unnecessary hospitalization days) HDOs and insurers will be able to optimize their treatment delivery costs and quality, leading to better healthcare to all. The resulting effect will allow Healthcare systems to better cope with treating the growing epidemiologic events, as seen lately.
• National and local infection disease and control agencies – Will be able to better control and contain outbreaks using accurate, timely and online Live Heatmaps – showing such outbreaks on of a single neighborhood level. This will allow local prevention activities, better track of the spread dynamics of the virus and prediction of the next possible infected area.
Based on our studies results at Hadassah Medical Center, our system can save:
• €380 on the overall patient treatment cost in the Hospital ER by 30% reduction of diagnostic mistakes leading for extra hospitalization time, extra lab tests and extra medical treatment (€340M/annually for the EU).
• €63 per GP visit by reducing 30% of unnecessary antibiotics and preventing return visits (€471M/annually for the EU).
• Telemedicine service is an evolving technology and specific numbers are not yet available, however, researchers estimate that in the US the number of virtual visits will surpass physical visits to GPs by 2024, and is estimated to be over 600M annual visits. Such estimations may even grow with recent Coronavirus outbreak and realization of the value of remote treatment.
