News and funding roundup: patient outreachers Relatient, Radix merge; health apps top 350,000; Morgan’s $50M in Vera Health; Communicare247, Doro, TeleAlarm join Scottish Digital Telecare’s list

August 11, 2021 | by

Patient engagement meets…patient engagement. Two relatively small players in patient outreach, Relatient and Radix Health, are merging. By no coincidence, the former announced that they received $100 million in growth equity capital from Brighton Park Capital and its affiliates. Brighton Park led an undetermined investment round for Relatient in November 2019. No valuation or management transitions were announced.

Tennessee-based Relatient sends text messages to patients as appointment reminders, patient chat, and broadcast messaging. It is a 2020 Best in KLAS winner for Patient Outreach. Relatient claims that in 2020 it sent 200 million messages and integrates with over 85 practice management systems and electronic health databases. Atlanta-based Radix Health has a somewhat different software set for patient scheduling, contactless check-in, appointment reminders, and reminders for medical groups, health centers, and hospitals prior to procedures. Earlier this year, Radix rolled out a Covid-19 vaccine location and scheduling system for their mid-sized and large provider clients, which by February scheduled 200,000 appointments and about 100,000 vaccinations. Both companies were founded in 2014. The merged organization will be headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, with offices in Cookeville TN, Atlanta, and Pune, India. Release, Mobihealthnews

Consumer health apps top 350,000. The IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science latest report on digital health trends tracked over 90,000 released last year alone. Managing health conditions makes up nearly half (47%, up from 28% in 2015) of apps. About two-thirds of digital therapeutics and 40% of digital care products treat either neurologic or mental health conditions. At this point, who’s counting? And are all of them working? Mobihealthnews, link to IQVIA report (registration and download required).

JP Morgan Chase’s new Morgan Health invested $50 million in Vera Whole Health, a western US primary practice group. Vera Whole Health operates on a membership flat-fee model and is fully at risk in a value-based, technology-enabled coordinated care model. Morgan Health adds to Vera’s coffers after the majority sale of the company to CD&R for an undisclosed amount and a valuation at $400 million. JP Morgan sunsetted its unsuccessful three-year joint venture, Haven, in January, but remains interested in health for profit and for employees, who will be given the opportunity to join Vera. Healthcare Dive, Mobihealthnews

Communicare247, Doro, and TeleAlarm receive Scottish Digital Telecare nod for digital alarms. Communicare247’s Archangel Care Cloud, Doro’s CareIP Mobile, Eliza 4G, and the icareonline platform, and the TeleAlarm TA74 GSM and TeleAlarm Cloud Services have been added to the Scottish Digital Telecare Security-Assessed Suppliers Scheme. They join Alcuris and Enovation, as reported in the past two weeks. Communicare247, Doro, and TeleAlarm releases.

Communicare247 advances in Scotland’s Project Liberty social care with Stage 2 funding

February 4, 2021 | by

Glasgow-based Communicare247 has won over £130,000 in funding for further development of telecare systems to be implemented in the second phase of Scotland’s Project Liberty. Project Liberty is designed to support social care for vulnerable individuals with chronic care needs, including cognitive, to live at home independently, while unobtrusively allowing health and care professionals to manage their risks and health. The support for Project Liberty comes via Scotland’s £9.2million Can Do Innovation Challenge Fund, and is expected to be completed by 3rd Quarter of this year.

The second phase of the project incorporates consumer devices such as voice-activated speakers (e.g. Alexa, left above), smartphones, and other smart wearables, sensors, and location technologies, through a novel monitoring system that can integrate with existing telecare home care alarms. It will deploy and test the system with those living independently and managing complex care needs, including Alzheimer’s.

Tom Morton, Chief Executive of Communicare247, emphasized the need to change over telecare from analogue to digital systems not only because of telecom, but also to extend care with advanced digital devices.  “A telecare system that uses Alexa and smart watches is a game changer. We are integrating common and easy to use consumer products along with IoT sensors and innovative telehealth monitoring in an existing data-led system that reports to carers, family members and emergency services as required. Currently, across the UK, there is an estimated 4 million elderly and shielding people who rely on analogue telecare systems to help keep them safe. Most of these systems are at risk of becoming obsolete due to the telephone network switch from analogue to digital. This gives the UK an unprecedented opportunity to adopt a leading digital-enabled assisted living care which will be delivered through Project Liberty.”

Starting in 2018, the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the Alliance) engaged with users on improvements to their supportive telecare. The first phase of Project Liberty started in January 2019. Communicare247 led and project managed this part of Glasgow City Council’s “Technology-enabled Glasgow” challenge, joined by partners and stakeholders including the Alliance, the Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership, and Tunstall.

The objective for Project Liberty is to be a scalable digital telecare template system to be deployed by local authorities, housing associations, and care providers across the UK. Interestingly, and perhaps uniquely for Scotland, the smart home devices for home care will connect with Scotland’s long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) which enables devices to collect and send data without the need for 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi. 

Additional information on Project Liberty can be found on the Alliance’s website and their webinar ‘Proof of Concept to Deployment’. There is also a 37-minute talk between Mr. Morton and Business Development Manager Ashley Mitchell on YouTube. Mr. Morton earlier contributed a TTA OnePerspective article in 2018 on telecare’s digital changeover. 

OnePerspective: Analogue telecare is a dead horse: stop flogging it

June 13, 2018 | by | 3 Comments

Editor’s Note: ‘OnePerspective’ articles are written by industry contributors on issues of importance to our Readers. They reflect the opinions of their authors and are archived under ‘Perspectives’.

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Tom-Morton-CEO.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]By: Tom Morton

Call failures to alarm receiving centres in the UK are rising but the reasons for this are currently the subject of hot debate.

The problem is linked to the roll out of the next generation network (NGN) replacing the UK’s analogue Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a task which will be complete by 2025.

What is not debatable is that 1.7m of the most vulnerable in our society are being placed at risk as calls to alarm receiving centres (ARCs) increasingly fail or are delayed in their delivery due to incompatibilities of existing technologies.

At the Telecare Services Association (TSA) conference in November 2017, technology-enabled care services company Appello, with circa 100k telecare system users, identified a 7.5 percent call failure rate and announced the problem as “deeply worrying”.

At the same event, Communicare247 presented a report which highlighted a significant 12.3 percent spike in call failures identified by Falkirk Council. This was part of an ongoing analogue to digital assessment program operating across 12 percent of the existing Scottish telecare user base, and significantly this spike occurred in Falkirk within a short three month period. Both Falkirk Council and Appello have published their evidence of increasing call failures in a TSA whitepaper.

The TSA white paper, A Digital Future For Technology Enabled Care, highlights that the 1.7million people in the UK reliant on telecare need answers as their service is “threatened by disruption as UK telecommunications shift from analogue to digital”.

Yet the link to call failures and the rollout of NGN has been called into question by a major equipment provider. In a recent blog, they asked a very challenging question: Are network issues causing a greater number of alarm call failures?

Their answer delivered by the blog was, in essence, ‘maybe not yet’.

In a comparison between one ARC, where call failures were high versus another where they were low, the blog claimed that “while the use of NGN networks has grown in the last few years this cannot account for the increasing trend”.

As a potential compromise, the author also said that they could overcome any potential issues through the use of hybrid terminal adaptors (ATAs).

However, evidence both in the UK and Sweden plainly demonstrates call failures increase as the network switches to digital. (more…)

What are the true costs of analogue care?

December 1, 2016 | by

With current approaches to Scotland’s social services labelled unsustainable, and health care similarly under pressure, this guest article by Tom Morton of Communicare247 argues that the potential for digital technology to address health and care needs should be realised now, rather than waiting for the limitations and costs of existing analogue solutions to become ever more apparent.

Health and care provision across the globe is under pressure to provide the best in care to a growing population, in the most efficient way possible. Different countries are responding in different ways.

In Scotland, rising demand and costs for public services mean that, “by 2020, the country’s 32 councils will have to spend an extra £700m on top of the £3.1bn per year spent now”, Accounts Commission chairman, Douglas Sinclair told BBC Scotland. He also called current approaches “not sustainable”.

Health is also facing significant financial pressures, with Audit Scotland reporting that Scottish NHS boards will have to make unprecedented savings of £492m in the current final year. Some may not be able to achieve financial balance, as all struggle to meet the needs of a growing and ageing population.

Health and care providers are looking to address these issues by delivering more person-centred services within the citizen’s home. For many this means wider use of telecare or technology enabled care (TEC) to provide remote monitoring, responsive alarms, and round-the-clock support for these individuals.

Telecare is delivering benefits; one report found that widespread, targeted use of telecare could create potential savings of between £3m to £7.8m for a typical council, equating to 7.4% to 19.4% of the total older peoples’ social care budget. Savings for the NHS have also been identified, with reductions in unnecessary hospital admissions and healthcare appointments.

So with such evidence of impact, it is disconcerting to know that only around one in seven of the over 65s have access to telecare services. Such technology could help address many of the issues affecting health and care provision, but it needs investment if it is to make its contribution.

Current analogue approaches are not fit for purpose
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/1950s-bakelite-md4.jpg” thumb_width=”125″ /]The UK needs to invest wisely. Currently most telecare systems are reliant on phone landlines – this is called ‘analogue’ telecare. But we need to invest in digital telecare if we want to maintain a society where our senior and vulnerable citizens can be cared for in an acceptable way.

The analogue delivery system is unsustainable due to increasing demands, with often tragic communication failures emerging that could be avoided. Current analogue services already report around 3% of failed call attempts between the home and response services, because they cannot communicate effectively over the new digital telephone network systems. (more…)