UPMC-Incubated Company Earns Top Marks From KLAS Research

Infectious Disease Connect helps clinicians choose the best antimicrobial therapies.

A company dedicated to bettering treatment of infectious diseases and antimicrobial stewardship, which also happens to be backed by a major academic medical center, has garnered top scores from KLAS Research, which judged the company based on service quality and superior high customer satisfaction in its category.

Infectious Disease Connect Inc. is backed in part by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) through its UPMC Enterprises startup incubator. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund also is an investor.

ID Connect, which recently combined with ILÚM Health Solutions decision support technology from Merck, gives hospitals timely, telemedicine-enabled consultations with infectious disease experts. ID Connect also offers ILÚM Insight to assist clinicians in choosing the most appropriate antimicrobial therapy while managing toxicity, price, resistance to drugs, and infection transmission. Assisted by machine learning algorithms, this technology associates a patient’s demographics, history of medication use and hospitalizations, as well as other data to generate treatment recommendations tailored to individual patients.

"Antimicrobial stewardship is now required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services," said Tyson Mehlhoff, research director of emerging technologies at KLAS, in a news release. KLAS  measures more than 400 vendors and 750 products and services. "In our early conversations with provider organizations," said Mehlhoff, the key outcomes they look for in antimicrobial stewardship and ID specialist partners are improvements in clinical outcomes, time savings, and safety, while remaining financially viable."

"In the face of a global pandemic and a growing shortage of infectious disease experts nationwide, ID Connect has never been a more important partner to the hospitals and patients we serve,” said ID Connect President and CEO David Zynn.

Having been deployed in more than 30 medical sites in seven states, ID Connect calculates that with its help, its customers have reduced patient transfers by up to 40%, cut antibiotic use by 30%, and reduced days of treatment per 1,000 patients by 40%.

In a recent KLAS report, using scores based entirely on customer opinions, ratings, and experience, ID Connect gained an overall score of 96.9 for service, with 80% of its customers sharing that they were “highly satisfied” and 20% “satisfied.” ILÚM Insight's platform had an overall score of 96, with 80% of those surveyed “highly satisfied” and 20% “satisfied.”