Care Innovations’ Slovenski, 23andMe’s Schwartz move to Healthways

January 13, 2016 | by

Breaking News: Healthways, an online wellness program company based in Nashville, this morning announced that two executives well known to many of us in digital health have joined them. Sean Slovenski, CEO of Intel-GE Care Innovations, is now their President, Population Health Services. Steve Schwartz, their new SVP Strategy and Corporate Development, joins the company from VP Business Development and Strategy, 23andMe.

Mr Slovenski’s track record in 2.5 years at CI certainly impressed this Editor (formerly with the developer of their behavioral telemonitoring system bequeathed from GE Healthcare, QuietCare) with turning around the company from an outpost of Intel and GEHC having difficulty transitioning from ancient technology (remember the Intel Health Guide?) to a telehealth platform dubbed Health Harmony. He also put together a team that engineered multiple academic and health system alliances, along with an interesting turn into home digital health certification. While he came to CI from health insurance giant Humana in Louisville Kentucky running their behavioral health and wellness businesses, his prior experience includes both entrepreneurial turns at his own company and with smaller companies. He most recently engineered a Louisville outpost of CI [TTA 14 Oct 15]. Since Mr Slovenski is still listed on the CI website as CEO, this may have been a quickly executed move.

Mr Schwartz’s business development background includes long stints at two large healthcare companies, Allscripts (EHRs and practice management software) and LabCorp (lab testing). He weathered 23andMe’s FDA troubles and headed up their B2B sales area. Healthways release

Unusually, Healthways is a NASDAQ traded company that closed at $12.11 today in a down market. It’s old (in our terms) having been founded in 1981, becoming publicly traded ten years later. Its last round of venture financing was $20 million from CareFirst BlueCross Blue Shield in October 2013 (CrunchBase). Healthways has a fairly new CEO as well, who joined last August and obviously feels comfortable adding to his team.

Big home health win for telehealth confirms trend: must expand services, analytics

December 5, 2015 | by

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. (more…)

Have we arrived at another, multi-functioning generation of telecare?

September 22, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Onkol.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /] Profiled in Reuters in an article on home monitoring for older adults is a desktop-sized, sleekly telecare unit called OnKöl (that’s On Call for those who wonder what an umlaut is doing there) for the home market. Debuting back in January at International CES, it monitors activity in an area of the home (that green eye looks like a vintage radio DuMont Magic Eye tuner) and is extended through home monitoring sensors such as bed, door and window. Like Lively, it also has an in-home wrist/pendant emergency alert device and is self-installed. But what’s new about it is its telehealth side–connecting via Bluetooth and USB cable to typical medical monitors such as weight scales, blood glucose and pressure, as well as a med reminder setup. These seem to be brand-agnostic. A unique safety feature is a caller ID recorder for tracking calls. Activity and health information are stored, with alerts going to designated family members. According to the article, the founder designed it for monitoring his mother recovering from colon cancer. The Milwaukee-based company is financed through Series A (Capital Midwest Fund, $2.8 million), moving towards Series B, and OnKöl will be in market early next year. What is not apparent (more…)

A trip back in time to telecare, circa 2009–and maybe the future

August 29, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Cape-May-Point-fade-to-dark.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]As the season winds down, our thoughts turn backwards. Your Editor remembers Jersey Shore vacations, travel, great airshows, collector car shows, old friends and good times. She also remembers When Telecare Was New (2006-9) with Living Independently Group (now Care Innovations), helping to pioneer the QuietCare system in senior housing. At that time, universities like Virginia and Florida were on the cutting edge in developing smart homes and pioneering systems for monitoring health in older adults and the disabled. Those smart homes and research initiatives vanished years ago, replaced by incubators, accelerators, the size of your funding round, Big Data, wearables, IoT….

Sigh. Your Editor is in Error. The University of Missouri is still at it 12 years later with its sensor-based behavioral/activity/proactive care system in the Tiger Place assisted living community near Columbia. And it seems much the same: bed and residential motion sensors, fall detection tracked by a variety of sensors, gait analysis and analysis of activity changes (changes in behavior=changes in health, which still doesn’t excite those in senior care the way it should) . You have to admire the persistence of vision the founders/researchers have had (Marilyn Rantz, professor emeritus with the School of Nursing, and Marjorie Skubic, a professor with MU’s College of Engineering). Their research model has now spread to 13 communities and hospitals in Missouri, and they are commercializing it with a former student, George Chronis, with Foresite Healthcare to convert it into a reliable, robust assisted living/hospital monitoring/care transition system with a simpler, affordable ‘health at home’ version. Besides the nostalgia and supporting fellow ‘true believers’, what they have designed is still needed AND not achieved by RFID (a big fizzle) or ancient PERS. We can all wish them luck in a competitive and much changed market. MU researchers taking sensor system from lab to marketplace (Columbia Daily Tribune)

Previously in TTA: Quantifying early detection capabilities of telecare (July 2012) and Editor Steve’s first look in October 2009 at ‘magic carpet falls’.

The NHS fail at encouraging digital health startups

August 18, 2015 | by

While Minister of Life Sciences George Freeman MP speaks very highly of the need for innovation and digital health in an NHS integrated health system, the reality is less encouraging for UK startups and their growth. The story of Big Health’s Sleepio and its move from the UK, told by Bloomberg, illustrates the difficulty that new companies and technologies have in fitting into a national framework, then selling into the 209 NHS regions plus related healthcare spenders. The long cycle and the narrowness of the frameworks are disincentives for many digital health technologies and their funders. Even if you win clients as part of being on the framework, when it expires after a few years, the business can be lost.

It’s hard to crack the code, and small companies are dependent on partners. A personal anecdote from this Editor’s time at Living Independently: the company achieved getting on a national framework with the QuietCare telecare product (2007) through partnerships with several larger telecare providers. We relied on them to offer QuietCare to the regions and councils. This had limited success and the US business far outstripped that in the UK.

Ten years ago, the situation was reversed. NHS, Government and council funding helped the earliest development and acceptance of telehealth and telecare, much as the Veterans Health Administration (VA) did with home telehealth and telemedicine in the US.  Other European markets and Canada have established private spending in this area, but these smaller markets–and funders– don’t have the potential that is possible in the US private market, even without reimbursement. The trend is reflected in investment: $4 bn in the US, less than €100 million in Europe. US developers now have a bonus in the potential of Asia, with China having the greatest interest and now funding. [TTA 23 July].  How the NHS Is Locking Out Britain’s Digital-Health Startups

‘Déjà vu all over again’ or critical mass? NYTimes looks at older adult care tech

July 28, 2015 | by | 4 Comments

“It’s like déjà vu all over again” as Yogi Berra, the fast-with-a-quip Baseball Hall of Fame catcher-coach-manager once said. About 2006-7, telecare broke through as a real-world technology and the tone of the articles then was much like how this New York Times article starts. But the article, in the context of events in the past two years, indicate that finally, finally there is a turning point in care tech, and we are on the Road to Critical Mass, where the build, even with a few hitches, is unstoppable.

Have telehealth, telecare, digital health or TECS (whatever you’d like to call it) turned the corner of acceptability? More than that, has it arrived at what industrial designer Raymond Loewy dubbed MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) in keeping older adults safer and healthier at home? The DIY-installed Lively! system keeps an eye on a hale 78 year old (more…)

10th Anniversary Article 1: The Next Ten Years of Telecare

April 29, 2015 | by | 1 Comment

This year, on the 10th Anniversary of Telehealth and Telecare Aware, we have invited industry leaders nominated by our readers to reflect on the past ten years and, if they wish, to speculate about the next ten. Here is the first article, with a UK focus, by Dr Kevin Doughty.

Many of us are frustrated at how little progress there has been in the deployment and acceptability of telecare during the past decade. Yet, despite warnings that an ageing population was about to bankrupt the NHS (and health insurance schemes elsewhere in the world), and that access to social care for older people was being withdrawn at such a rate that it could only be afforded by the wealthiest in society, our health and social care systems have just about survived.

But this can’t go on, and in England over the past 12 months: (more…)

Care Innovations, UMMC Telehealth Center to expand care outside the home

April 29, 2015 | by

Intel-GE Care Innovations, which markets both telehealth and telecare (QuietCare, one of the pioneers in behavioral telemonitoring) products, announced today a broadened relationship with the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Center for Telehealth. CI will help them to establish the Innovation Living Lab which will create and evaluate new models of care via remote technology and techniques for behavioral change. The Lab will open at UMiss’ Venyu Technology Center sometime in 2016. UMMC and CI’s goal is to extend care models so that the home is a key location for care delivery. In the past year, both had partnered on the Diabetes Telehealth Network. CI since their change of management has made several interesting moves in the past year, including grouping telehealth systems under Health Harmony and creating a Validation Institute. Business Wire.

3rings Plugs in to reassuring families

March 11, 2015 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3rings-plug-default.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /] Stoke-on-Trent’s 3rings, which we noted over a year ago [TTA 6 Feb 14] as a smartphone/call/text-based family alert system based on the older person’s phone check in, has developed a plug that will do this check in automatically. It’s based on behavior–an older person turning on or off an appliance as part of their daily routine (a tea kettle or TV), based on rules that the family sets up. The plug goes into the wall outlet with the appliance plugged into it. Usage sends a wireless signal to the 3rings portal and notifies family or neighbors that the person is active and moving about. Presumably this is a small appliance–there’s no tech spec that gives maximum wattage. (The plug may short out if Dad likes to get up to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on his McIntosh amplifiers driving two Klipschorn floor speakers.) A subscription service at £12 per month, with the plug at laddered prices of £79 inclusive of the first month, £183 with a 12 month subscription with the plug at half price plug and £288 with a two year subscription. Interestingly this Editor received this news  (more…)

Looking back over Telehealth & Telecare Aware’s predictions for 2014, part II

January 9, 2015 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/magic-8-ball.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Editor Charles has treated you to a look back on his 2014 predictions, daring Editor Donna to look back on hers. Were they ‘Decidedly so’, ‘Yes’, ‘Reply hazy, try again’ or ‘My sources say no’? Read on…

On New Year’s Day 2014, it looked like “the year of reckoning for the ‘better mousetraps’”? But the reckoning wasn’t quite as dramatic as this Editor thought.

We are whipping past the 2012-13 Peak of Inflated Expectations in health tech, diving into the Trough of Disillusionment in 2014.

There surely were companies which turned up ‘Insolvent with a great idea’ in Joe Hage’s (LinkedIn’s huge Medical Devices Group) terms, but it was more a year of Big Ideas Going Sideways than Crash and Burns.

Some formerly Great Ideas may have a future, just not the one originally envisioned. (more…)

buddi wins £20 million in contracts, signs up with Care Innovations in US

December 16, 2014 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/lavender_set_34.jpg-buddi.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]buddi, a well-known UK personal tracker/tagger company, announced over the weekend that they have signed two contracts worth £20 million ($25.1 million). The first and most of interest is with Intel-GE Care Innovations for their new, quite attractive wrist-worn fall detector/two-way emergency alert/activity monitor. According to the Telegraph, it was designed by Sebastian Conran (left) and was ‘fully certified by the US government in recent weeks’ which may mean that it gained FDA clearance. The second was for their ‘Smart Tag’ used in criminal tracking with the New South Wales, Australia government. Care Innovations adds another consumer-facing device to the Lively activity tracker and iHealth fitness and telehealth devices. Timing for availability is not disclosed. (more…)

Life expectancy up, but so is death from falls (US)

October 16, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”175″ /]The Gimlet Eye falls outside the box, and is writing this from recovery. Our companion in curmudgeonliness, Laurie Orlov, whacks us upside the head with first the good news then the bad. US life expectancy is up: if you are 65 today, on average you will live to 83 (men) and 86 (women), even with the rise in chronic conditions that affect quality of life, such as diabetes and heart disease. But the bad is that death from falls is also up. This is despite all the systems and gizmos the Digital Health Industry has concocted to detect falls beyond 1970s PERS technology. Once upon a rose-colored Telecare Time we thought we could infer falls purely by sensors detecting lack of activity (the basis of QuietCare, GrandCare, Healthsense, the late WellAWARE). Then with accelerometers, fall detection would be automatic, (more…)

Telecare helping Alzheimer’s patients live in the ‘connected home’

August 28, 2014 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140825141047-lively-pillbox-sensor-story-top.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]There’s life in telecare–it’s (finally) morphing into ‘connected home’. Is this ‘slope of enlightenment’ and ‘plateau of productivity’ time?  We haven’t had a spotlight on the part of telecare which is sensor-based behavioral monitoring, but here’s one that shines on not just one but four systems which indicates a big change in focus, long developing: SmartThings, Lively, BeClose and certified Grizzled Pioneer GrandCare Systems. CNN.com crafted an article out of a fairly obvious placement by the Alzheimer’s Association, but all to a good end.

Notably SmartThings by Physical Graph (just purchased by Samsung for a reported $200 million after raising $15.5 million through Series A, undoubtedly for their algorithms and in its health reach strategy versus Apple Health) pitches itself on its website as simple home automation, yet this article is all about older adult safety. Lively, which is depicted with an interesting connected pill dispenser (above) and BeClose carve their approaches close to caregivers.  All three are DIY systems. GrandCare remains the anomaly, with the highest (custom) home install price ($699 and up) but with a home tablet that engages the older person with virtual visits, music, pictures, daily updates and family/clinician connectivity. They were also first to move in this direction; this Editor recalls their pioneering in the home automation area with CEDIA, the home electronic design association.

After years, are we finally seeing a shift in consumer perception?  (more…)

Ding! Telecare developer Healthsense raises $10 million in 8th round

August 22, 2014 | by

Sensor-based remote monitoring company and certified Grizzled Pioneer Healthsense has completed a raise of $10 million, its eighth round of funding since its founding in 2003. This round was led by new investor Mansa Capital with previous investors Radius Ventures and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. Mansa has current investments in only two other companies–smartphone med adherence platform HealthPrize Technologies ($3 million from Mansa just yesterday) and employer behavioral health risk manager E4 Health (CrunchBase) with a third, Independent Living Systems, listed on its website, but was a prior investor in well-known Athenahealth. Earlier investors Ziegler HealthVest Management (2007) and West Health did not join in this round. The VentureBeat article alludes to home monitoring pilots with home health providers Humana Cares/Senior Bridge and Fallon Health–odd since Healthsense has always had units in home health. Last year Healthsense bought rival telecare company WellAWARE [TTA 2 July 2013] after the latter experienced difficulty (more…)

The CES of Health (Monday)

January 7, 2014 | by

A managing director of Accenture, writing in Forbes, looks at the health tech trends as ZDNet did (TTA 5 Jan) and lobs a few surprises. He checks the boxes for wearables and real-time monitoring (what ZDNet called The Internet of Things), but also added in–happily for us–aging in place technologies, giving as examples household robots, med dispensers, video calling, easy navigation screens and interfaces (Bosch Health Buddy Web, GrandCare?). Surprisingly on the list: telecare–“motion sensors that can tell if a person has fallen”. Could it be QuietCare’s and Healthsense’s time–or will these be in a watch form factor? And how about proactive fall detection to help prevent them in the first place?

Withings gets into the Z-Z-Z-Z market: the Aura Smart Sleep System monitors noise, room temperature and light level. It also has an under-mattress sleep sensor to monitor breathing, body movements and heart rate. The app on your mobile device makes sense of the data so you can understand your sleeping patterns and make needed changes for better rest. It’s one of ZDNet’s top 10 products (so far) today.

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/blue-blazes.jpg” thumb_width=”100″ /]Our Blue Blazes award (so far) goes to the Kolibree Bluetooth Toothbrush. It connects with an app which somehow sizes up how well you–and other members of your family–are polishing their pearlies. Crowdfunding this summer, available either in July or 3rd Quarter (depending on reports) for iPhone and Android (Samsung Galaxy III and S4). It sounds like a good fit for the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue. MacRumors The Guardian takes an even more dim view by including it in its ‘Day Zero vapourware at CES’ list but Engadget likes it (the job to be done by the inventor related to the kids).

And if you are already there, accelerator/investor RockHealth has a guide to where they will be participating at CES through 9 January here, if you’re interested.

A change of guard at GrandCare Systems

November 14, 2013 | by

This Editor has often referred to her former competitor GrandCare Systems as one of the ‘grizzled pioneers’ on the Conestoga Wagons of Telecare–even more grizzled than QuietCare (circa 2003-4) since their ur-system dates back to 1995-6, when it kept track of founder and CEO Charlie Hillman’s mother Clara. In the years since, the closely-held company has broadened its original telecare and activity monitoring tech into telehealth, socialization and home automation/monitoring into the most fully featured system in telecare/telehealth for older adults. Without making huge splashes, being beholden to VCs or moving from bucolic West Bend, Wisconsin, the company has grown through multiple alliances, the most unusual being home automation association CEDIA. GrandCare has a residential base of customers but has also developed a solid footing in senior communities both in assisted and independent living. Earlier this year, they reached into UK to partner with Saga [TTA 24 Jan, 10 Jan] and received the CE Mark for approval of its telehealth features for EU distribution.

The news is that they have a new CEO–Daniel Maynard, who is joining from (more…)