Intel-GE Care Innovations announced yesterday a partnership with NYC-based Happify to integrate their mental health for caregivers app into Health Harmony by 1st Quarter 2016. Happify is a game-based app targeted to caregivers of the chronically ill to support their mental health and wellbeing through cognitive behavioral therapy, ‘positive psychology’ and conquering negative thinking. Currently it is marketed to healthcare providers and corporate wellness programs. According to the release, “By adding on access to Happify’s innovative mobile app, Care Innovations will be able to leverage state-of-the-art programs to improve the well-being of family caregivers and offer additional programs to its clients.” This is certainly an interesting integration to the typical vital signs and qualitative information gathering of patient data in thinking about the caregiver. However, we note that a previously announced partnership, with UK’s buddi announced last December, is not to be found on the CI website. Release (Business Wire)
Successful large-scale deployment of Telehealth: a “cookbook”
Following a two and a half year evaluation of data from different connected health programmes in five European regions, a report [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ACT-programme-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]was released this week described as a “cookbook” for large-scale deployment of coordinated care and telehealth. The work was carried out by a consortium led by Philips Healthcare and included participants from The Netherlands, Greece, the UK, Spain, Italy and Germany.
After monitoring coordinated care and telehealth initiatives in five EU healthcare regions – Lombardy (IT), Basque Country (ES), Catalonia (ES), Northern Netherlands (NL), and Scotland (UK) – the EU-funded Advancing Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment (ACT) Programme has produced this ‘cookbook’ of good practice to facilitate their deployment across Europe. (more…)
Care Innovations finds a home in Mississippi
The Intel-GE Healthcare joint venture, Care Innovations, last week inked a full five-year deal with the University of Mississippi Medical Center to use remote care management tools, such as their Health Harmony telehealth platform, in the home setting to reduce readmissions and ER/ED use. The chronic medical conditions they will be tracking are congestive heart failure, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and hypertension. According to Healthcare Finance, the RPM, data analytics and application integration services they are developing may be offered outside the state. This follows on reported positive results produced by a statewide population health program, the Diabetes Telehealth Network, involving both CI and UMMC’s Center for Telehealth. The results for the six-month first phase of the remote care management program, which included 100 Mississippians with diabetes: a 1.7% average A1C reduction, zero hospitalizations and ER visits, and a savings of $339,184 over six months. The CI and UMMC goal is to enroll 1,000 patients per month through 2016, and to save $189 million in Medicaid cost among diabetics alone. Care Innovations release. Health Data Management. This follows on GE Healthcare’s acquisition of healthcare consultancy Camden Group [TTA Nov 12]
Scientific survey of telehealth/telemedicine in the US
The Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care sent [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Robert-Graham-Center-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]surveys to more than 5,000 randomly selected phyicians, intentionally oversampling rural ones, and received a high 31% response (1,557 respondents). Fifteen percent of the respondents indicated that they used telehealth according to the report on the analysis the data (the terms telehealth and telemedicine are used interchangeably in this report), “Family Physicians and Telehealth: Findings from a National Survey”, co-written by six authors, which is available now.
Compared with non-users, family physicians who use telehealth are more likely to practice in a rural location, be younger, have practiced for 10 or fewer years, and employ an electronic health record (EHR), says the report. Almost half (49 percent) of telehealth users practice as part of an organization that is not physician owned (e.g., an integrated health or hospital system). More than half of telehealth users reported using telehealth one to five times in the past year, while more than 23 percent reported using telehealth on more than 20 occasions during the same period. Almost half of telehealth users stated they had used real-time video consultations in the past 12 months. In addition, 55 percent of surveyed telehealth users had used telehealth services for diagnosis or treatment in the past 12 months, and one-fourth of surveyed telehealth users reported using telehealth services for chronic disease management. (more…)
Drive to ACOs and value-based care may make 2016 The Year of Telehealth (US)
An encouraging prediction? Two Foley & Lardner attorneys with evidently a great interest in healthcare predict that 2016 may very well be The Year of Telehealth. Why? They cite accountable care organizations (ACOs) and the coordinated care at the heart of their model as a protected activity under the Medicare fraud and abuse waivers. “Coordinating care, such as through the use of telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and other enabling technologies”is “an activity reasonably related to the purposes of the Medicare Shared Savings Program and therefore is eligible for protection under one or more of the fraud and abuse waivers”. National Law Review, mHealth News. While from the legal point of view this may be significant, there’s been a concatenation of other factors.
What are the drivers for telemedicine and telehealth in ACOs? In the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP), which is one model, ACOs must leverage savings, and perhaps the largest is avoiding unnecessary hospitalization costs among ‘high-risk’ patients–those with chronic disease–and usually more than one. They are also over half of high ER/ED utilizers. The Federal agency behind Medicare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has since 2011 been signing up ACOs in risk and value-based payment models that offer incentives such as shared savings. In 2014, only 28 percent of ACOs in the MSSP program earned shared savings bonuses. (more…)
HIMSS Connected Health Conference/mHealth Summit starts Sunday–save $100
Time is short! This Editor will be attending the HIMSS Connected Health Conference this November 8-11 in Washington, DC (actually outside The Puzzle Palace in National Harbor, Maryland). Telehealth & Telecare Aware has been a media partner (disclosure) since the 2009 mHealth Summit. Changes this year include that it is three conferences in one: the original mHealth Summit with the Global mHealth Forum, the new PopHealth Summit (concentrating on health improvement on the community, regional and national level) and the much needed new CyberSecurity Summit.
Attend all three for one registration, including a large Exposition floor and three pavilions for Population Health, Cybersecurity and Games for Health. Also, there are extra co-located and add on events, mainly on Sunday the 8th. The Global mHealth Forum focuses on mobile and connected health in low and middle income countries (LMICs) and is on Wednesday.
The Summit organizers have been kind enough to offer an excellent discount to our readers of $100. When registering, click on the advert (above, right hand side) and use the promotional code TELEHEALTH100 to receive it. (more…)
Scottish Digital Health and Care Week
7-11 December, Strathclyde University’s Technology & Innovation Centre, Glasgow
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/digiweek15eps-_2.jpg” thumb_width=”120″ /]This year’s conference theme is “Using innovative technology to enable more integrated, sustainable & person-centered health and care”. It offers the opportunity to learn from across Scotland, the UK and beyond, with a mix of workshops and plenary sessions. Topics include the critical lessons learned when deploying technology enabled services at scale, drawing experiences from telecare, telehealth and eHealth; learning crucial lessons from the experience implementing the UK wide DALLAS programme. Delegates are encouraged to discuss current knowledge base on a range of topics; network with colleagues from across the relevant sectors; and actively consider application to their own practice. There are also multiple events during the week; more information at SCTT’s website. Registration. Hat tip to Mike Clark via TwitterNew telehealth investment in Wales
The Welsh Government is to invest £250,000 in expanding telehealth services in rural parts of the country, it has been announced [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Welsh-Goverment.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]today. This is part of a £10 million investment that was announced in January to improve efficiency in the Welsh NHS.
Information available indicates that this telehealth investment is primarily in imaging technology enabling specialists in distant centres to access X-ray and other images taken at rural health facilities closer to the patients.
The press release from the Welsh Government quotes the Health Minister Professor Mark Drakeford as saying “Telehealth already means orthopaedic specialists in Abergavenny can look at X-rays from Brecon to avoid unnecessary travel for patients. This investment will take stock of all practices which use telehealth across NHS Wales (more…)
Dartmouth-Hitchcock withdraws from Pioneer ACO
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center has announced it will withdraw [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Dartmouth-Hitchcock-MC.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]from the Pioneer ACO program after losing more that $3M over the past two years.
The Pioneer Accountable Care Organization (ACO) Model was designed by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) Innovation Center to encourage the development of ACOs which are groups of healthcare organizations and providers (e.g. doctors) that work together to provide care for their patients at a lower cost to Medicare while maintaining (more…)
Primary care ‘virtual health’ could save $10 billion annually: Accenture study
A newly-released Accenture study on US primary care estimates that savings of about $10 billion per year in US primary care could be achieved through use of ‘virtual health’, defined as “digital tools such as biometric devices, analytic diagnostic engine and a virtual medical assistant” that would allow much of the work of a typical office visit to be done prior to or separately from the visit, and follow up/check in tools such as video visits/telemedicine which would further offset costs. The cost savings were calculated by Accenture Insight Driven Health as a total of time-per-visit savings of five minutes–when aggregated, $7 billion, $300 million in telemedicine visits, telehealth self-management in diabetes alone $2 billion, health system savings $63 million. This could potentially solve the shortage of US PCPs now projected at 31,000 in the next ten years. Nary a mention of patient care savings, chronic care management or telecare for proactive behavioral home monitoring, however. Accenture release (BusinessWire), Accenture page and paper.
3 companies through to next stage in SBRI Telehealth/Telecare
Three of the eleven companies through to the next stage of the NHS Small [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SBRI-logo.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Business Research Initiative (SBRI) are in the “Telehealth/Telecare for people with Learning Disabilities” category, according to the latest news release on the SBRI website. Each will receive a further £1 million to continue with prototype development and product testing.
The three companies are Red Embedded, Maldaba and Cupris Health. The other companies going through to the next stage are BioSensors, Digital Creativity in Disability, Bering, Docobo, ADI, Folium Optics, Armourgel and MIRA Rehab.
SBRI Healthcare is an initiative from NHS England supporting a programme of competitions inviting companies to come forward with their ideas and new technologies for known NHS challenges. In the last year, SBRI Healthcare has launched 10 new clinically-led competitions and awarded £22.4 million to 60 companies to develop products focused on specific NHS unmet need.
Read the full news release at SBRI Healthcare Funds Companies to Develop Game Changing Technologies.
Telehealth in the ME – report from The Economist
It is rare to hear about telehealth from the Middle East, so it is refreshing to see a report dedicated to this subject. [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Enabling-Telehealth.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]”Enabling Telehealth: Lessons for the Gulf” is a new report from the Intelligence Unit of The Economist which identifies principles and practices relevant to the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) region. GCC is a regional intergovernmental political and economic union consisting of all Arab states in the Persian Gulf except for Iraq – i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE.
The report has been commissioned by Philips and studies the environment in which telehealth operates – the policies, infrastructure, associated skills and institutional users. The Economist interviewed several experts for this report: the director of the Center for Connected Health Policy, associate Dean of the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Connected Care, chief medical officer of the European Health Telematics Association, a senior lecturer in professional healthcare education at the Open University and CEO of the International Alliance of Patients’ Organisations.
As the report points out in its summary, “… access to telehealth depends not only on telehealth technology. Policy frameworks must be modernised, communications infrastructures such as broadband and mobile network coverage must be improved, and skillsets – both of clinicians and patients – need to be strengthened.
Five key findings in the report are
- Ensuring access to telehealth depends not just on the technologies, but on the broader enabling environment, especially policy harmonisation, communications infrastructure, and skills.
- Governments should consider more efficient licensing if telehealth is to enable patients to access medical expertise outside of their state, province or country. Here it cites the examples of USA and Europe. The state by state licensing in the US is a barrier to telehealth and the cross-state harmonisation in the EU helps telehealth.
- Telehealth provision must go hand-in-hand with Internet infrastructure rollout, since vulnerable populations are the lowest users of the Internet.
- Focus on systems integration: “… build usable systems with the requisite security and privacy” which “work seamlessly with those already in place”.
- Health providers may need support in working with new technologiesThe full report is available to download here.
Connected health to help cure–physician burnout?
Here’s an interesting proposition: digital health tools such as telemedicine, telehealth and mobile health can help to reduce physician burnout. Except that if one is looking for support points in this HCI Healthcare Informatics article, one would be hard pressed. There’s no link to QuantiaMD‘s study (a 225,000-member US physician community), an inexplicable lapse. Your persistent Editor tracked it down, and found it connects the dots a bit more. It starts with the proposition that nearly half of doctors wouldn’t recommend medicine as a career to their children, then identifies a key frustration–“healthcare technologies that sap time and money are among the top reasons.” The solution? Other “emerging technologies—in the form of telemedicine, mHealth tools, and connected health devices—may actually help reverse this trend of physician burnout.” The paper then describes how telemedicine virtual visits, giving patients telehealth tools which will aid compliance and monitoring, especially with new treatments, and the opportunity to improve care all are Good Things. But not entirely convincing that these can be effective in mitigating the complex reasons why behind doctor burnout. Read the QuantiaMD study for yourself. Hat tip to Stuart Hochron, MD, JD of Practice Unite via LinkedIn
76 percent of post-surgery patients prefer telehealth followup: study
A 50-patient study at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee found that online-only post-surgical followup was acceptable to 76 percent of patients after uncomplicated surgery (hernia repairs, laparoscopic gall bladder). These patients, all of whom had internet access and a smartphone, tablet or digital camera, took their own pictures of their surgical site and transmitted these digital images through an online patient portal established by Vanderbilt. Both patient and doctor communicated through the portal to discuss follow-up care (though not necessarily at the same time). Another plus was that the online visits took significantly less time for patients (15 versus 103 minutes) and surgeons (5 versus 10 minutes). The surgeons reported a comparable effectiveness number–68 percent–for both online and in-person visits. Clinic visits were more effective in 24 percent and online visits for 8 percent. What was also notable was that no complications were missed via online visits. The program used to analyze images, typically used in wound management, was not disclosed in the study, which was performed between May and December last year. mHealthNews, Journal of the American College of Surgeons (abstract only)
ONC gets in study game in designing the Consumer Centered Telehealth Experience
ONC (the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, HHS) in the spring conducted a design session on creating a more consumer-centered telehealth experience, commissioning the engagedIN research firm to help select a panel, run it and produce the study. The white paper focuses on how telehealth can either further fracture or integrate PHR (study pages 7-11), and what’s needed to make telehealth and telemedicine more convenient and effective for consumers. The panel avoided the big telemedicine providers (a bone that Mobihealthnews picks with the study) which typically dominate these panels–to this Editor a positive action–but included other telehealth providers like Qualcomm Life, Care Innovations and Zipnosis, as well as the US’ largest user of telehealth, VA Home Telehealth. Among the key drivers of telehealth are HHS’ and private insurers (UHC) shift to value-based payments; CMS’ target of 50 percent of Medicare value-based care is cited (page 5). There are nine principles at the end (pgs 13-16) to guide the way forward. Designing the Consumer Centered Telehealth and e-Visit Experience (PDF) (Though it is confusing why e-Visit was used rather than ‘virtual visits’ or, in fact, telemedicine.)
The difficulty in bringing telehealth to those needing it most
California’s Center for Connected Health Policy, which is the National Telehealth Policy Resource Center, has published a study which concludes that community health centers (CHC)–a general term covering Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) and Rural Health Centers (RHC)–have difficulty sustaining telehealth programs to support the underserved and ill with chronic conditions including mental health without grants or other subsidies. Consultant Milliman studied five California CHCs and determined that other than financial, major impediments to successful implementation were structural: complex billing and reimbursement rules, and difficulty tracking telehealth visits through multiple EHRs that weren’t necessarily compatible with each other or with billing systems. Many of these CHCs cannot financially provide telehealth without grants or other subsidies. This study holds lessons for telehealth companies which are working with ACOs, hospital discharge programs and practices in rural areas, as well as the Indian Health Service. Study (link to PDF), Healthcare Informatics, California Healthline Hat tip to Elizabeth Olis of Viterion Digital Health
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