FRISCO, Texas & WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) and Give Life Foundation today announced an alliance to support the rapid deployment of an Immune Registry to help combat COVID-19.
This partnership is the result of collaboration between ETT and Give Life Foundation, which began based on their collective interest in the development and operation of national registries and further encouraged by President Donald Trump and members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate advocating for a national registry in order to preserve life and get the nation back to work.
The ETT team has world-class experts not only in healthcare, government policies, innovative business growth, but also in responding to this type of national challenge. Bart Fisher, chairman and co-founder of Give Life Foundation also co-founded the Nation Marrow Donor Foundation in response to the absence of a donor registry in the U.S. and has worked on establishing large bone marrow donor registries around the world.
The online registry would log recovered COVID-19 patients who have likely developed immunity to the coronavirus, and this would help the effort to speed up the return to normal life in the U.S. This is similar to the immunization registries for children currently in place in the U.S., where all vaccines received as a baby and young child up through high school are recorded online in an immunization registry.
In a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La) and Christopher Mores, global health professor at George Washington University urged “to restart the economy, the government needs to set up coronavirus-immunity registries….Recovering from a known coronavirus infection or having a positive antibody test is likely to indicate immunity lasting for at least some time. Those who so demonstrate that they are immune can be allowed to return to work. The whole community is freer when herd immunity is established.”
There are several efforts already underway to establish a registry, including the Convalescent Plasma Program recently launched by the American Red Cross at the request of the Food and Drug Administration. The American Red Cross collects less than 30 percent of the nation's blood; however, while blood banks and other health care providers collect the remaining amounts of blood. The state of New York has also launched a registry, which is intended for use primarily if not entirely by New Yorkers.
"ETT feels a sense of urgency in our partnership with Give Life Foundation to lend our capabilities and support to this national, and ideally swift moving, initiative to stand up a national COVID-19 registry to save lives and spur economic recovery,” said Shahal Khan, board member for ETT. “Our BioDatAi platform is available today, and we know that a registry can be actualized in a matter of weeks, which will make a huge difference in the lives of the American people.”
“We believe that the COVID-19 pandemic requires a federal response to coordinate the various disparate efforts that have been launched,” said Bart Fisher, chairman and co-founder of the Give Life Foundation. “The proposed registry would manage the distribution of convalescent plasma to hospitals, other health care providers, and blood banks to assure rapid access to patients in need.”
Fisher also assisted with The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which established federal registries for solid organ transplants and bone marrow transplants.
Other countries have already turned to high-tech surveillance systems in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus. China rolled out a mandatory smartphone app that asks citizens questions about their level of exposure to people who have demonstrated symptoms, and automatically orders certain users to quarantine themselves. Singapore has issued a similar app that uses Bluetooth to detect people's proximity to those who have been exposed to coronavirus and warns them to get tested if they come in close contact. Taiwan is using big data to contain the spread of coronavirus. Due to its proximity to China, Taiwan could have hit hard by the COVID-19. It is said that over 400,000 of its citizens work in mainland China. However, the country’s use of big data analytics and cellphone tracking assisted officials to control the spread of the virus, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
“The United States is behind in applying advanced technology into dealing with this global crisis,” said David Smith, chief technology officer for ETT. “Much as we learned from 9/11 the data and interoperability can make a significant difference. It’s time for us to apply the lessons from 9/11 and subsequent events to create this national federated repository and to apply the systems of systems approach at all levels from the federal, state, local government, the commercial sector, all the way down to the individual citizens the power and data to make significant advances against this pandemic.”
About ETT
Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT) is a data-centric, multi-disciplinary tech holding company formed to bring a Systems of Systems approach to solving sovereign nations and large commercial problems. The centerpiece of its approach is its BioDatAi Platform, a central interoperable, intelligent, collaborative and secure hub that streamlines the development of innovative applications that deliver value across clinical and business aspects of healthcare. The Platform is MU and MU 3 compliant, HIPAA and HiTrust certified at the platform level, and built to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. For more information visit https://ett.world/
About Give Life Foundation
Give Life Foundation’s mission is to increase the awareness of the chronic shortage of the U.S. blood supply encourage the donation of blood, blood products, organs and tissues. It supports the work of not-for-profit organizations to include the American Red Cross, National Marrow Donor Program, Aplastic Anemia and MDS International Foundation, United Network for Organ Sharing and Whole Kids Foundation. For more information visit http://give-lifefoundation.org/
