Cohealo to Mitigate COVID-19 Ventilator Shortages by Sharing Between Hospitals

BOSTON – Cohealo, a platform for health systems to track and share medical equipment, today announced that the company will begin onboarding customers to their national ventilator sharing network. The solution will enable health systems to monitor capacity and dynamically mobilize ventilators to the hospitals that need them most.

Ventilators are in critical supply from the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationally, there are estimated to be as few as 100,000 ventilators with only an additional 12,700 in the strategic stockpile. The CDC has predicted that 160 million to 214 million people in the United States could be infected during the pandemic, with models projecting a need for more than 250,000 ventilators to combat the outbreak.

“The time for sharing is now,” said Todd Rothenhaus, M.D., Cohealo’s chief executive officer. “To date, the pandemic has not hit every part of the nation equally. Optimizing ventilators between geographically disparate locations has the potential to stretch existing ventilator capacity to reduce morbidity and save lives.”

Cohealo has conducted more than 5,000 shares of 127 different equipment types, with expertise in mobilizing even the most delicate of assets, including microscopes, lasers, and surgical robots. The company retains 99.9% move reliability with specialized workflows that diminish the potential for breakage or delays.

“With almost a decade of experience tracking and sharing medical equipment for some of the largest health systems in the country, our team is poised to solve this challenge,” said Brett Reed, Cohealo’s chief operating officer. “Hospitals have an urgent need for ventilators, and we have logistics in place to get these assets to patients quickly.”

Using the Cohealo platform, hospitals can upload inventory, track usage, and develop an operating picture of available capacity across all participating facilities. When there are spikes in demand, the system selects the best candidates for sharing and quantities to be moved.

End-to-end logistics is supported directly in the platform, including waybill creation, mobilization procedures, and chain of custody. This process ensures equipment is transported safely and that ventilators are returned to point of origin. Additionally, health systems have access to a digital equipment catalogue that contains profiles of each ventilator type, ensuring all the relevant make/model details and OEM manuals are available for respiratory therapists and biomedical teams.

“Together, we have the ability to maximize the use of ventilators during this crisis. We have tremendous capacity as a healthcare system to get doctors the resources they need,” said Rothenhaus.

About Cohealo
Based in Boston, Cohealo finds savings for health systems by increasing the utilization of their medical equipment through proactive data analytics and equipment sharing. With deeper insights into equipment usage, hospitals can pinpoint redundant equipment, opportunities for rental avoidance, and ways to share equipment between facilities. As the program scales within a health system, the network effect drives increasing levels of savings by reducing redundant purchases and decreasing rental expense. Cohealo has been named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies List and CNBC’s Disruptor 50 and is recognized as the first solution of its type to bring the sharing economy to healthcare.