Ireland’s TASK Community Care launches TASK Connect in Northern Ireland for the UK market

TASK Community Care, which was the first personal alarm and telecare company serving Ireland starting (an unbelievable) 45 years ago, has opened a fully-owned UK subsidiary, TASK Connect. It will be located in Lurgan, Northern Ireland. TASK Connect will provide 24/7 alarm services along with GPS location tracking with fall detection devices and monitoring. These can be ordered online, streamlining customer service and user implementation.

TASK Connect recently won a competitive tender with one of Northern Ireland’s eleven councils. The new Lurgan operation will also serve as a base for TASK’s expansion in the rest of the UK. 

Toni Bunting, TASK Connect’s managing director, stated “Our online product range will steadily expand as we solidify our presence in the UK market. Concurrently, our core focus is on refining operations, honed through years of dedicated service to TASK Community Care customers, ensuring an even more streamlined and customer-centric service for all our customers in the UK.” TASK Connect release

Editor’s note: Long-time Readers remember Toni as our Ireland Contributing Editor. She rejoined TASK earlier this year after time out of the industry. Welcome back, Toni! 

TEC Cymru launches telecare programme strategy for Wales to complete digital transition by 2025

TEC Cymru, Wales’ national platform to use, scale up, and spread technology-enabled healthcare across health and care, has launched its new Telecare Programme Strategy to guide digital migration changes over the next 18 months for the December 2025 digital telecom deadline. 

The strategy document, published today (9 Nov) outlines action to support Welsh ARCs (Alarm Receiving Centres) with digital migration over the next 18 months, working with NHS and social care entities. The goals are:

  • Ensure telecare services in Wales are fully ‘digitally enabled’ comfortably ahead of the 2025 deadline
  • Shift the narrative from reactive to proactive care through common data standards and interoperable protocols allowing for greater
    opportunities for widespread TEC adoption
  • Enable a culture of high performance and measurable outcomes on the importance of telecare in Wales to its citizens through producing consistent business intelligence data

Once this is accomplished, the next move will be to move forward with Next Generation Telecare and a workforce restructured to handle reactive and proactive alerts, supported by health and social care teams.

For migration, the test bed was The Vale of Glamorgan Council. They completed their upgrade to a SaaS-based digital ARC in six months, from January to July this year. Their summary report is here. TEC Cymru also provides a toolkit for pre-migration planning. More information on their website. Release (PDF).

Perspectives: Where next for technology-enabled care after 2025?

TTA has an open invitation to industry leaders to contribute to our Perspectives non-promotional opinion area. Today, we have a contribution from Adrian Scaife, Global Product Manager at Tunstall Healthcare Group. Can telecare save the UK more than £14bn over the next 10 years, as FarrPoint projected–or is that an underestimate based on the past? Can we do better than this?

Interested contributors should contact Editor Donna. (We like pictures and graphs too)

FarrPoint recently published a report showing how extending telecare services to more people could save the UK more than £14bn over the next decade. While £14bn is no small sum, it is based on the evidence of hindsight and importantly through current models of reactive service provision.

In a LinkedIn post I boldly suggested that this should be an underestimate of the benefits that Technology-Enabled Care, associated with a wider transformation of care, could deliver over the next decade.

With increasing demand for care and support combined with finite resources for provision, the statutory care system is facing a perfect storm. The cracks have been appearing for some time but have become apparent to a much wider audience during the Covid pandemic. To be blunt, the current model of care provision is unsustainable in the medium term. (And many would argue today!)

By moving to more preventative, personalised, joined up and proactive service models, supported by communities as well as statutory services, the benefits are potentially much bigger across the whole care ecosystem. (The care ecosystem includes health care, social care, housing, the third sector and, the largest group of all, informal family carers.)

Source: Social Care Future  

This new vision is being discussed by many people and organisations across the care ecosystem and has been referenced, in whole or part, in a host of reports over the last couple of years. What is most encouraging is the consensus around the direction of travel.

The real challenge is the transformation of services from purely reactive, one size fits all, to a preventative and person-centred approach across housing, social care, health care, and the third sector, supported by families, friends, and communities, while still retaining a reactive safety net.

There are important questions around the how? Enabling and underpinning these new service models will be technology using data, information, and actionable insight. New technology has already created dramatic changes in many other sectors across the UK. There is a huge demand for a new set of tools that can, for example, flag everything is OK today or when an early intervention may be required. These tools will work on an individual personalised basis and all the way up to the population level. Joining up data and using insight provided by analytics will enable new high value timely personalised interventions and provide improved outcomes for all stakeholders. 

The good news is that there are a huge variety of companies already working on these challenges from start-ups to SME’s, larger companies, and even global players. The real challenge will be around people (e.g., new working practices) and processes (e.g., new models of commissioning), and of course, culture. Part of the new story will be about enabling working across all stakeholder groups and indeed recognising families as equal partners.

Finally, this is not a transformation that will take place overnight or even within a year but a journey that will take five or more years before it reaches any type of maturity. The green shoots already exist if you look for them, they may be a little tender and frost sensitive, but they are growing! It reminds me of the early telecare journey in the late 90s and early 00s when many could not see how it would scale to where we are today!

While £14bn from traditional reactive services would be welcome, the real opportunity for improved outcomes for all stakeholders across the care system is much greater and not just in an economic context. Personally, I am enormously excited to be playing a part in enabling those tender shoots to grow, thrive, and become the norm over the next few years.

Further reading:

Alertacall receives Queen’s Award For Enterprise: Innovation

One of the items that whizzed by this Editor while she was in Pepper the Robot mode was the highly prestigious Queen’s Award For Enterprise: Innovation, awarded to one of the pioneering companies in UK telecare, Alertacall Ltd.  Their CEO and founder, James Batchelor, is an old friend of TTA from early days with Editor Emeritus Steve. (Editor Donna hadn’t even thought of marketing health tech at that time.)

Alertacall provides tablet touchscreen connectivity to the housing, care markets, and personal markets, from OKEachDay checkins to smart home systems controlled by the touchscreen.

Alertacall was founded in 2004 by James, the original inventor of the “I am okay” button. Like many of us in those days, he had a personal inspiration for being engaged with creating a better way to support older adults in their home–Eveline, his own staunchly independent grandmother. She was, in James’ words “a shop keeper for much of her life, and a B+B operator up until her early eighties. After the death of 2 husbands – the first of whom was detained as a Prisoner of War in WW2, she learned to drive in her late 50s, travelled the world on her own and was an inspiration to many with her grit and determination to live on her own, and under her own terms for as long as possible.”

Also, James’ gracious note from LinkedIn, posting on the Queen’s Award:

We won this Queen’s Award because of the great technology we have created for sheltered and supported housing to help independent older people, women fleeing domestic violence and people who are disabled – to feel safe, connected and informed.

This award really is testimony to that innovation, but more so to the incredible team I have the joy of working with each day. This is an award for them and their phenomenal care of our customers.

In July I’ll be attending a winners reception at Buckingham Palace with HRH The Prince Of Wales – on behalf of those team members. My grandma, Eveline, who was the inspiration for Alertacall would have been pretty excited by that I think.

A lot of you run your own businesses, and some of you might have started those from scratch. So you’ll understand that external, independent validation is rare, and a great feeling when it comes.

Many of you have also been a positive part of our journey – and if so thank you, sincerely.

Dame Esther Rantzen DBE, the well-known British journalist and TV presenter of That’s Life! on the BBC for 21 years, who was instrumental in the founding and popularization of both ChildLine and The Silver Line helplines, is a supporter of Alertacall. Her statement is attached here.

Our warmest congratulations to James and the Alertacall team!

Alertacall announcement.

Extending telecare services to 800,000 more people could save the UK £14.5bn: study

An economic analysis by digital connectivity consultancy FarrPoint found that extending telecare and technology-enabled care services to more people aged 75+ could achieve benefits of  £14.5 billion over the next decade. By country, the savings are £12.3 billion in England, £1.1 billion in Scotland, £717 million in Wales, and £370 million in Northern Ireland.  The benefits are improving social inclusion, wellbeing and community resilience, alleviating bed blocking and hospital admissions which are highly quantifiable costs to the healthcare system.

Currently, 2 million people use telecare services in the UK. Based on current take-up rates of 1 in 5 (aged 75+), if this were 1 in 3, an additional 800,000 people could benefit from access to technology-enabled care across the country (eHealth Scot). Over the next decade, that group will likely grow to 1 million, totaling 3 million of the estimated 7.3 million aged 75+ in 2030 (Office of National Statistics estimate)

FarrPoint’s point of view is that the expansion of telehealth is necessary to alleviate the coming demographic crunch in the social care system to prevent a crisis. Their definition of telecare is a modest one: pendants connected to alarm centers and door, bed, and fall sensors.

Their findings are also linked with the first-ever telecare analysis across Wales for TEC Cymru, the program responsible for supporting the shift to technology-enabled care in Wales, where 67% of councils are moving from analog to digital technology for telecare services to their current 77,000 persons, mostly over 65. FarrPoint article

Caveat: we do hope they account for the downsides of VOIP and power outages cutting all telecom off to the vulnerable, all too common in the rural parts of the UK where they live [TTA 21 Dec 21].

Hat tip to Adrian Scaife, who has moved to the ‘Big T’ as Group Product Manager Housing at Tunstall Healthcare (in a smart move on their part!)

Bexley, Wandsworth Councils onboarding remote monitoring, video calls with COVID-19 the spur (UK)

With Round 2 of the pandemic hitting the UK (and rising rates in EU and also parts of the US), it’s timely that borough councils have already stepped up their efforts to extend home monitoring and connectivity to the most vulnerable older adults and disabled. Here’s a short roundup:

  1. The London Borough of Bexley has been working with Docobo to install their DOC@HOME technology to connect residents with their GP to manage their health and well being at home. DOC@HOME connects with the patient via tablet (Android) tablet, computer, Docobo TV, or smartphone to their clinical teams to enroll, set up, and manage their patients using Docobo’s reporting platform. This version of DOC@HOME used two types of question sets: to set up a doctor consult requested by the resident or staff member and to conduct monthly wellness checks. The pilot was completed with one care home with these results (2019 vs 2018 same period): 71 percent fewer visits by GPs to the care home, and 36 percent fewer visits by residents to A&E. Bexley is now rolling out to 20 care homes using an NHS Digital pathfinder grant. Later plans will be rollout to individual homes.
  2. The Bexley Council is also piloting another Docobo product, ARTEMUS, a risk stratification platform, with the Bexley Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to create an analytics and decision support platform to support a more holistic approach to health and wellbeing at the individual level. Risk stratification at its most essential level uses data to classify residents or patients at their level of health risk (multiple chronic conditions) with the objective of mitigating long-term escalations in care needs and emergencies and integrate support, particularly to integrate support for those with dementia. 1 and 2 from NHS AI Lab Hat tip to Adrian Flowerday of Docobo for his LinkedIn post.
  3. Wandsworth Council is working with Alcove to provide the Carephone tablet to their residents who receive a care or support package. The Carephone enables them to make video calls with family, friends, care workers, and other approved service providers. Wandsworth Council article.

10 years in 2 months: prognosticating the longer-term effect of COVID-19 on telehealth, practices, and hospitals

crystal-ballThis Editor recounted last night in the article below on The TeleDentists’ fresh agreements with Cigna and Anthem the observation of a former associate who has been in the thick of the remote patient monitoring wars for some years that telehealth/telemedicine has progressed 10 years in 2 months. Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), stated to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled),  “I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one. I think it’s fair to say that the advent of telehealth has been just completely accelerated, that it’s taken this crisis to push us to a new frontier, but there’s absolutely no going back.” Even in a short period of time, CMS-reported telehealth visits as of 28 March trebled from 100,000 to 300,000. When the April numbers are in, it would not be surprising to see it grow well into seven figures.

The genie may be out of the bottle, but what will the genie do? Genies are, after all, unpredictable, and fly around.  Out of the smoke, some educated guesses:

  • Insecure, non-HIPAA compliant audio/video platforms will be the first which should be struck from CMS approval. Zoom has become a hackfest, with all sorts of alerts from mobile providers like Verizon on how to secure your phone. (An organization of which this Editor is a member had a panel this week completely disrupted by a hacker in five minutes.) Skype’s problems are well known. The winners here will be telehealth platforms that integrate well with EHRs, population health platforms (or may be part of population health platforms), and have robust security.
  • Primary care practices and specialists, who’ve been surviving on non-F2F visits, will be adjusting their practices to patient demand, and integrating telehealth with physical visits in a way that their patients will prefer. This means a search for integration of EMRs/EHRs with secure platforms and reconfiguring areas such as care coordination. If planned correctly, this could create better management of patients with multiple chronic conditions.
  • Actual physical visits will rebound, creating financial pressure on Medicare, hospitals, and private payers. How many people’s health has declined in two-three months is key. Small practices, who may see this first, will see another level of pressure, because they will be held to their Medicare quality metrics in value-based models even if adjusted. Hospitals will also rebound–if they are able. The dark side: private payers may run the numbers and scale back on benefits for the 2021 year especially if COVID is projected to make a return.
  • Behavioral health may benefit, yet drive individual practices and a wave of retirements, or a consolidation into clinic or group settings. There’s a reason why Optum is buying out AbleTo; we may see a wave of competitor acquisitions in this area with the emphasis will be on cognitive health and short courses. Why retirements? Many psychiatric practices are still independent, concentrated geographically, and the average psychiatrist is over 50. Psychiatric EHRs are both costly and not particularly suited to practices. If faced with technological challenges, a lot of MDs and senior clinical psychologists may very well exit–threatening clinics which need MDs to legally operate.
  • Rural health’s failure accelerated. USA Today’s analysis pinpointed at least 100 rural hospitals to close within the year. They already operated on thin margins, but with COVID expenses for additional equipment, the closing down of more profitable elective procedures and dependence on Medicaid, the over 1,100 unprofitable hospitals, over half of which are the only hospital in their county, have received a body blow. HHS allocated $10 billion to rural hospitals and clinics of the $100 billion aid package, but it may be too little and too late. Becker’s Hospital Review continues to track the bankruptcies and closures. Here there are no easy solutions from the digital health area.
  • A culture of cleanliness should accelerate. If the genie pulls this out of the bottle, one major benefit will be that hospital-acquired infections will decline. Effective sanitization methods that reduce human application and scrubbing will be the ones to look at: disinfecting foggers and UV full room or area systems–or combinations of same. Cleanliness and lack of virii and bacteria may become a new metric. Look and bet on companies that can provide this, from rooms to computers/mobile tablets and phones.

Readers can help with these prognostications and especially how they will play out not only in the US, but also in the UK, Europe, and worldwide.

CEO to CEO: TSA’s Alyson Scurfield interview with Tunstall CEO Gordon Sutherland (updated)

If you are following the changes at Tunstall Healthcare, TSA’s Alyson Scurfield’s talk with Gordon Sutherland has some significant news. The investment from Barings, M&G, and the lender group has been confirmed as a change of ownership. It could be inferred from the release, but was not explicit.

From Mr. Sutherland: “The change in ownership deal is now subject to several legal steps including a European Commission review regarding Competition Law. We expect to be able to address any issues and the deal to be signed in late June/July.” Checking back on the Charterhouse website, Tunstall is still categorized as an unexited portfolio company (or ‘unrealised’ in a more delicate term).

Another reveal in this conversation is a strategic statement that segments care and presumably the company’s direction into four parts, somewhat like Roman Gaul (which was three or five, depending on the history you’re reading):

  1. Reactive care: for instance an alarm bell or PERS press
  2. Proactive care: reactive plus social care and well checks
  3. Predictive care: sensor-based tracking in the home. Presumably this would be rules-based (i.e. time) on ADLs.
  4. Tunstall has added to this Cognitive Care or “Intelli-Care” which would combine presumably #2 and #3 along with other healthcare data from the user which would be analyzed to deliver social or health ‘nudges’. While in its ‘infancy’ according to Mr. Sutherland, this type of system would also detect changes in vital signs which require intervention.

#3 and especially #4 referred to as in ‘infancy’ leave this Editor puzzled. Back in 2006-9, the QuietCare system (still sold by Care Innovations) had changes in ADLs based on a normative model baselined over two weeks pretty much nailed down. There are more advanced systems such as CarePredict that take that motion and movement and have put it on a wrist-based sensor system that is now sold for individuals at home as well as in group living–with fall prediction and a PERS for good measure. Vital signs monitoring can also be done with other personal devices, watches, and smartphone/tablet reporting, but medical grade monitoring is another step further with far more complex integration.

Part 2 of the conversation will discuss what are the anticipated changes to health and social care service sectors and the proposed strategic direction of TSA. Hat tip to one of our Readers

Updated 25 April: A further snippet on how the new investment will play out at Tunstall is found on healthcare business intel provider Laing Buisson’s Care Markets website. In their view, the Barings/M&G investment will be “supporting the restructure, which will see the business recapitalised and debt reduced to £180m….” The rest is unfortunately only available to Care Markets newsletter subscribers, of which we are not. Again, no mention of Charterhouse.

Appello acquires Medvivo Careline telecare in second major move this year (UK)

Appello announced another major acquisition to close out the year. Effective 5 December, they have acquired the home monitoring business of Medvivo, Medvivo Careline Ltd. Careline provides telecare alarm monitoring, ‘comfort calls’, and out-of-hours call monitoring services to at-home and at-risk customers. The company was formerly known as Magna Careline. Terms were not disclosed.

The Medvivo Careline acquisition increases Appello’s monitoring customers by about 20 percent to approximately 250,000. Appello’s earlier acquisition this year was of RedAssure Independent Living from Worthing Homes [TTA 17 Oct]. Appello is the UK’s largest telecare monitoring service.

Medvivo, in its statement, took some pains to position the sale as enabling the company to focus on their now core business of integrated urgent care services across Bath and NE Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire. It demonstrates that the UK health tech area continues to consolidate, notably in the monitoring area.

The Careline website has already been cut over to Appello here. Appello release.

News, moves and M&A roundup: Appello acquires RedAssure, Shaw departs NHS Digital, NHS App goes biometric, GP at Hand in Manchester, Verita Singapore’s three startup buys, Novant Health and Tyto Care partner

Appello telecare acquires RedAssure Independent Living from Worthing Homes. A 20-year provider of telecare services to about 700 homes in the Worthing area in West Sussex, the acquisition by Appello closed on 1 October. Previously, Appello provided monitoring services for RedAssure since 2010. Terms were not disclosed. Release.

Another NHS Digital departure is Rob Shaw, deputy CEO. He will be leaving to pursue a consulting career advising foreign governments on national health and care infrastructure. He is credited with moving the NHS Spine in-house and establishing NHS Digital’s cybersecurity function. The Digital Health article times it for around Christmas. Mr. Shaw’s departure follows other high-profile executives this year such as former chief digital officer Juliet Bauer who controversially moved to Kry/LIVI after penning a glowing article about them [TTA 24 Jan], Will Smart, Matthew Swindells, and Richard Corbridge.

One initiative that NHS Digital has lately implemented is passwordless, biometric facial or fingerprint-based log in for the NHS App, based on the FIDO (Fast-Identity Online) UAF (Universal Authentication Framework) protocol (whew!). NHS Digital’s most recent related announcement is the release of two pieces of code under open-source that will allow developers to include biometric verification for log in into their products.

Babylon Health’s GP at Hand plans Manchester expansion. The formal notification will likely be this month to commissioners of plans to open a Manchester clinic as a center for GP at Hand’s primarily virtual consults. This follows on their recent expansion into Birmingham via Hammersmith and Fulham CCG which will be notified. How it will work is that patients registering in Manchester would be added initially to a single patient list for GP at Hand located at Hammersmith and Fulham CCG. Babylon is now totalling 60,000 patients through GP at Hand.  GP Online

Singapore’s Verita Healthcare Group has acquired three digital health startups. The two from Singapore are nBuddy and CelliHealth, in addition to Germany’s Hanako. Verita has operations in Singapore, the US, Asia-Pacific and Europe, with 35 alliance partnerships with medical clinics and hospitals across Australia, Southeast Asia and Europe. Mobihealthnews APAC

Novant Health, a 640-location health system in North Carolina, is introducing Tyto Care’s TytoHome integrated telehealth diagnostic and consult device as part of its network service. Webpage, release

If the market’s expanding, where’s the telecare and TEC boom?

A question this Editor’s been asking since 2007, wondering why the rising tide of the market isn’t lifting the business boats. Adrian Scaife’s brief article on the TSA blog rhetorically asks the question and speculates on some answers. Mr. Scaife starts with the Care Technology Landscape Review’s [TTA 18 July] simple fact that growth in the UK has been flat for the past decade at 1.7m users nationally. Yet the demographics, social care dynamics, and the desire to live independently at home, enabled by more accessible and usable technology, should mean otherwise. 

Some of the reasons why are addressed in the Care Technology report: the industry’s focus on bright shiny tech, what sells to organizations versus emerging needs–and not focusing on benefits to the end users or ‘design and delight in the way the solutions look’ (the Apple paradigm). As Mr. Scaife put it, “It is perhaps not surprising consumers are currently voting with their feet!”

What might get the feet going in the other direction?  A “new generation of telecare that builds on existing services” that “delivers proactive, preventative, consumer friendly services with positive reassurance”. The difference is that this can be enabled by both “interoperable devices” (that shiny tech) but integrated with data that can provide that proactive insight. But those insights must be supported by a health and social care structure, more in place in the UK than in the US, for instance–and that may require the transformation first versus later. Why Isn’t Our TEC Industry Booming?

Telecare – time to sweat the analogue assets, not dump them

Veteran Editor Charles climbs on his soapbox, one more time.

There must have been a moment, somewhere, when a bronze age warrior realised that iron really cut the mustard (and other things) better. Unfortunately, that resulting genetic preference for new over old has left us open to the blandishments of salespeople through the ages, encouraging us to take every opportunity to buy new and cast out old.

And it costs! A current example is the drive by many telecare companies to use the digitalisation of the telecoms network in the UK to encourage users to ditch their analogue equipment in favour of their new shiny digital kit…when there’s no need. The telecare world has of course an honourable tradition of encouraging box shifting – back when I ran a telecare programme at LB Newham, in 2007 the government was encouraged to offer a Preventive Technology Grant to all local authorities. Perhaps the most memorable campaign though was Three Million Lives which, from the outside, appeared to have that one aim. Indeed there must be few telecare consultants who have not at some point in their career opened a cupboard to find the shelves heaving with unused – and sadly in a few cases unusable – kit.

Wise telecare providers will resist the current pressures though – both BT and Virgin have been provided with a wide range of old analogue telecare kit to test in their digital simulators alongside the appropriate digital/analogue converters and, I am reliably informed, it has worked well every time. Some companies, I am told, may not have taken full advantage of these facilities and only tested their new digital offerings, whilst ignoring analogue; I’ll leave the reader to work out why they might have done that. This is important because telecare kit is built to last and whilst some service users will benefit from the latest tech wizardry, most will be completely happy with the older kit – indeed those with dementia may find it impossible to get used to any new kit, providing one more incentive not to change. The original cost of that analogue kit must conservatively be well over £500 million, so it would seem to be a crying shame just to dump it whilst it still works well – indeed with local authority budgets as they are, it effectively would hugely reduce their ability to provide a service for all who want it.

There is of course one potential issue, as no power comes down the fibre telecoms lines, unlike with copper, so the service could fail in a blackout. However I understand that both BT and Virgin are working on solutions to this. GSM alarms, supposedly the future, are also vulnerable; indeed apparently this already happened a a few weeks back when the country suffered widespread power outages, when mobile networks failed in some areas. I understand that many masts don’t currently have a power back-up for such occasions and those that do only last 30 minutes.

So, if you are responsible for a telecare provision budget and a nice salesperson pops by to encourage you to switch out your old, ask them how their old kit behaved in the network simulations when paired with an appropriate converter.

If they tell you anything other than that it went really well, look askance. If they say they haven’t tested their old kit, ask them why not.

Doro AB acquires Invicta Telecare from Clarion Housing, increasing to nearly 200,000 users (UK)

While this Editor was on holiday, Sweden’s Doro AB increased its presence in the UK with the acquisition of Invicta Telecare, parent of Centra Pulse and Connect. Invicta’s products will join the Welbeing PERS service. which at the time of their acquisition last June had about 75-80,000 users [TTA 7 June 18].

Invicta was sold by Clarion Housing Group, the UK’s largest social housing association, which includes a property development company and a charitable foundation. Invicta’s 2018 revenue was £6.3 million. Like Welbeing, Centra Pulse offers basic and mobile PERS, but also has multi-sensor in-home connected home capability. It is also one of the top three UK monitoring services and is a major provider of after-hours contact services for telecare providers, such as housing associations and local authorities. The sale was effective on 1 September.

The UK remains the largest telecare market in the European region with an estimated 1.8 million telecare connections. It faces a transition to digital from analog systems which affects social care spending and residential service capabilities. Doro operates in the UK and about 40 countries, with a core business in mobile phones specially designed for older adults. Doro announcement, press release

IBM gives sensor-based in-home behavioral tracking a self-driving car ‘spin’ in the UK with Cera Care

In-home behavioral tracking of older adults, which was a significant portion of telecare circa 2007 up until a few years ago, may be getting a new lease on life. The technology in this round is the same as what guides self-driving vehicles–LiDAR or Light Detection and Ranging, which uses laser light pulses to map images of movement and surroundings. 

In this model, IBM Research will use the LiDAR information and their machine learning to establish normal patterns and also to observe behaviors that may indicate a potentially dangerous condition or situation. The LiDAR pilot will be in 10-15 households in the UK starting in June. IBM is partnering with early-stage UK home care company Cera Care on the reporting and linking with care staff on alerts on changes in behavior that may predict a more acute condition. 

Many of the privacy issues that dogged predictive behavioral telemonitoring via networked infrared motion sensors, as well as in-home cameras, are present with LiDAR monitoring. Unlike 2007, five states have ‘nanny cam’ laws that prohibit cameras within skilled nursing facilities without patient consent (Senior Housing News) Another issue: expense. LiDAR sensor setups cost up to $1,000 each, and at least one per room is needed. Far cheaper setups are available from the Editor’s long-ago former company, QuietCare, if one can still purchase them for the home from Care Innovations; Alarm.com, UK’s Hive Link, and Google may get into the act with their Nest connected home tech.

Senior housing may open up a new market for LiDAR, which is wilting in the autonomous vehicle (AV) area as it’s proven to be rather buggy on real roads with real drivers. Certainly the housing and care market is growing and destined to be huge, with over-60s growing from 900 million in 2015 to 2 billion worldwide in 2050, while for-hire caregivers are shrinking by the millions.  Business Insider, Reuters

News roundup: Virginia includes RPM in telehealth, Chichester Careline changes, Sensyne AI allies with Oxford, Tunstall partners in Scotland, teledermatology in São Paolo

Virginia closes in on including remote patient monitoring in telehealth law. Two bills in the Virginia legislature, House Bill 1970 and Senate Bill 1221, include remote patient monitoring (RPM) within their present telehealth and telemedicine guidelines and payment in state commercial insurance and the commonwealth’s Medicaid program. It is currently moving forward in House and Senate committees with amendments and. RPM is defined as “the delivery of home health services using telecommunications technology to enhance the delivery of home health care, including monitoring of clinical patient data….” Both were filed on 9 January. Virginia was an early adopter of parity payment of telemedicine with in-person visits. The University of Virginia has been a pioneer in telehealth research and is the home for the Mid-Atlantic Telehealth Resource Center. mHealth Intelligence

Chichester Careline switches to PPP Taking Care. Chichester Careline is currently a 24/7 care line services provided by Chichester District Council. Starting 1 March, PPP Taking Care, part of AXA PPP Healthcare, will manage the service. According to the Chichester release, costs will remain the same, technology will be upgraded, and telecare services will be added. Over the past 35 years, Chichester Careline has assisted over 1 million people across Britain. 

Sensyne collaborates with University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute (BDI) on chronic disease. The three-year program will use Sensyne’s artificial intelligence for research on chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. Sensyne analyzes large databases of anonymized patient data in collaboration with NHS Trusts. BDI’s expertise is in population health, clinical informatics and machine learning. Their joint research will concentrate on two major elements within long-term chronic disease to derive new datasets: automating physician notes into a structure which can be analyzed by AI and integrating it into remote patient monitoring.  Release.

Tunstall partners with Digital Health & Care Institute Scotland. The partnership is in the Next Generation Solutions for Healthy Ageing cluster. Digital Health & Care supports the Scottish Government’s TEC Programme and the Digital Telecare Workstream. The program’s goals are to help Scots live longer, healthier lives and also create jobs.  Building Better Healthcare UK

Teledermatology powered by machine learning helps to solve a specialist shortage in São Paolo. Brazil has nationalized healthcare which has nowhere near enough specialists. São is a city with 20 million inhabitants, so large and spread out that when the aircraft crew announces that they are on approach to the airport, it takes two hours to touch the runway. The dermatology waitlist was up to 60,000 patients, each waiting 18 months to see a doctor. The solution: call every patient and instruct them to go to a doctor or nurse to take a picture of the skin condition. The photo is then analyzed and prioritized by an algorithm, with a check by dermatologists, to determine level of treatment. Thirty percent needed to see a dermatologist, only 3 percent needed a biopsy. Accuracy level is about 80 percent, and plans are in progress to scale it to the rest of Brazil. Mobihealthnews.

Canary Care re-emerges as Canary Care Global Ltd, confirms continued operations

imageCanary Care, which entered administration in late August, has been reorganized and continues as Canary Care Global Ltd, remaining in Abingdon. The purchaser in the pre-packaged sale, as Readers learned here, is Lifecycle Software Ltd. Their marketing office sent a release last week confirming their operations. Stuart Butterfield, who answered our inquiries in September, is now managing and technical director. He is quoted in the release: “This is a really positive development for our company. We will continue to provide the Canary Care product and service that our existing customers know and love. Our new owner provides us with the stability and resources to further enhance the Canary Care offering and we’re very excited and optimistic about the future and the opportunity to bring Canary Care to a wider audience.”

The administrator’s latest filing with Companies House is clearly a wrapup of the sale as the best possible outcome for the company. Shareholders included major investor Mercia Fund Management. A quick read of the administrator’s proposal is an object lesson how quickly an insolvency can happen. In section 2, the company went from seeking fresh funding to expand markets in May, having been turned down by Mercia due to their funding criteria, to having an interested buyer who ultimately was not approved by the shareholders by a hairsbreadth, to insolvency by August.

We do wish Canary Care luck with their new ownership and success in this very difficult time for acceptance of –and payment for–telecare and TECS services. Release (PDF) Hat tip to Nicola Hughes of Lifecycle Software