BedIQ is an AI-powered patient-flow tool that pulls together clinical, operational, and capacity data in real time, recommends the best inpatient bed for a patient waiting in the emergency department (ED), and routes it to a clinician for a single-click approval.
Developed during this year’s Hexcite cohort (the Johns Hopkins digital health venture lab run through Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures), BedIQ originated as an initiative of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in partnership with the RAISE Center and is led by four Johns Hopkins physicians who, between them, have spent more than 35 years on the front line of triage.”
“We don’t study this problem. We live it every shift,” the team says. The four physicians come at the work from both sides of the ED–inpatient divide:
- Isabel Rocha Pimenta, MD, MBA — hospitalist, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Director of Strategy and Digital Health, Division of Hospital Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview.
- Arun Ponshunmugam, MD, MBA — the emergency medicine physician on the team, bringing the ED-side perspective on what boarding looks like at the source.
- Venkat Gundareddy, MD, MPH — hospitalist, Associate Director, Division of Hospital Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview, focused on clinical operations and the day-to-day mechanics of inpatient flow.
- Catherine Washburn, MD — hospitalist, focused on patient flow and quality.
Moving a single patient from the ED to an inpatient bed touches many team members: the ED physician who initiates the admit, the triage MD who may or may not be available, the admitting MD with veto power, a bed coordinator working from siloed data, a charge nurse confirming the bed, a unit nurse with no real-time visibility, an ED nurse giving verbal report, a cleaning crew notified last, and a transport team activated at the very end. Any one of them can stall the move. And beds marked available in the chart frequently are not.
The downstream cost is enormous. At Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center alone, the team counts roughly 207,275 ED boarding hours a year, causing an estimated $16 million in annual losses from throughput inefficiency, including about $2 million in manual triage coordination.
“This is a huge and multifaceted problem and resolving the coordination issue is incredibly difficult and complicated. This is why we are creating BedIQ,” says Dr. Ponshunmugam. When a patient is ready in the ED, the BedIQ tool pulls real-time clinical and operational data, scores the available beds for fit, and presents a clinician with an explainable recommendation. The design target: automate roughly 75 percent of routine moves and surface the most complex 25 percent — the cases that genuinely need expert judgment — to the right person, faster.
“Not replacing clinicians,” Isabel Pimenta and her co-founders emphasize, “but giving them system-level intelligence to unlock capacity that already exists.”
BedIQ is built deliberately for the hospitals that other vendors overlook. Existing patient-flow platforms tend to serve large health systems that can afford expensive command-center infrastructure. The team estimates that 98 percent of U.S. hospitals have fewer than 500 beds and no command center, which is a market of about 5,880 hospitals representing a $3.5 billion opportunity that today is largely unserved.
Shaving 30 to 60 minutes off boarding for each patient translates to roughly $3 million to $7 million in annual value per hospital, driven by more admissions, fewer diversions, and shorter lengths of stay.
The team plans to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) development under faculty mentorship, run an internal pilot at Bayview, and pursue the next round of funding, including small business innovation grants.
The project’s mentors include Professor Paul Nagy, PhD, who has been one of BedIQ’s most vocal advocates, along with Martin Copenhaver, PhD, Derek Baughman, MD, Ian McCulloh, PhD, and Liyu Lo, with engineering support from the Whiting School of Engineering through The RAISE Center and BIDS.
The BedIQ team is actively looking for more collaborators to help take the project from prototype to broader pilot. Interested collaborators can contact Isabel Pimenta at [email protected].