Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a diagnostic tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate a score to assess the prognosis of individual patients diagnosed with COVID-19 at the point of care in outpatient settings. The tool may enable urgent care centers and emergency departments to make rapid and automatic determinations about which patients are most likely to develop complications and need to be hospitalized. The Diagnostic Challenge The primary objective of most current COVID-19 diagnostics is to determine whether a person does or does not have the virus. However, once a patient tests positive, providers must make crucial decisions about hospitalization and treatment based on the patient’s individual risks and likelihood to develop complications. In addition to promoting sound care decisions, having a tool to assess the prognosis of COVID-19 patients would also help physicians avoid overburdening already extended hospitals by hospitalizing only patients at greatest risk of negative outcomes. The Study When the COVID-19 pandemic first began, infectious disease physician Gregory Robbins, MD, enlisted the help of his colleagues on the MGH Biothreats to develop a sophisticated method of assessing the risk of outpatients diagnosed with COVID-19. Dr. Robbins and a team of experts in neurology, […]