One of the most logical places for telehealth, remote care management (RCM) and transitional/chronic condition management (TCM/CCM) is with home health providers and post-acute care, yet perennially it has been on the ‘maybe next year’ list for most telehealth providers. That ‘next year’ may be getting a little closer with the news that Intel-GE Care Innovations has inked a multi-year deal (no pilot-itis here) with major (~400 facilities) home health provider Amedisys using their PC/tablet-based Health Harmony platform.
The initial focus is an ambitious one: reducing hospitalizations and ER/ED visits among patients with congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, depression as well as patients who have two or more of these conditions (co-morbidities). The most interesting to this Editor is the parenthetical mention of analyzing ADLs (activities of daily living) with clinical data. Does this imply the engagement of their venerable ADL monitor QuietCare? (It’s something the founding company worked on circa 2006 while this Editor was there; one would think the analytics have advanced since then.) Another aspect is that Care Innovations will manage Amedisys’ complete RCM program from recruiting to logistics, data analytics and application integration services. Business Wire
What this means: Telehealth (and telecare) companies are now increasingly obliged in these big wins to provide a plethora of additional related services. Health care providers demand services beyond the monitoring technology. They want the turnkey package, from nurse evaluations, care coordination/management, to analytics and logistics.This ‘service creep’ implies alliances and mergers to add on to technological monitoring capabilities–and beaucoup financing. Care Innovations’ long sojourn with academia (University of Mississippi Medical Center TTA 17 Nov, University of Cincinnati, Jefferson School of Population Health and the Validation Institute TTA 25 Nov 14) may be paying off indeed. (Let’s not fail to notice their new center in Humana-ville, Kentucky, TTA 14 Oct.) Deep pocketed parents helps as well.
(We also note that Care Innovations’ ongoing partnership with telecare/in-home monitoring company Lively! is now with mobile/senior service provider GreatCall since their acquisition of Lively’s assets reported by us here. Or not?)
This trend is also reflected in this short but thoughtful article by Dean Sawyer of Sentrian analytics on the ‘contextualized us’ which riffs on wearables, dismisses the ‘quantified selfers’ (QS) but then focuses on what’s really important and achievable for companies and providers now, mostly around predictive analytics but also around enhanced services: reducing hospitalizations, identifying high-risk patients who can be affected by technology, track multiple parameters long term, and use machine learning (modeling). 5 Ways to Optimize your Remote Patient-monitoring Efforts
Most Recent Comments