Proactive Healthcare

Potentially predictable health events place enormous burdens on the healthcare system, yet today the system remains almost entirely reactive. The temperature gauge on our cars represents more monitoring than we perform on ourselves. Even in hospitals with plenty of sensors, monitoring is still largely manual, even while other industries have developed highly sophisticated algorithms to predictively monitor the health of machines.

What if technology were available today to automatically monitor human health and detect subtle, early warnings signs of impending events?

• A hospital patient recovering from surgery develops sepsis. Diagnosis by conventional means costs critical hours before appropriate antibiotics are administered. As a result, the patient's hospital stay is lengthened by days, and there is even the risk of death. What if the onset of sepsis could have been detected earlier with automated monitoring of typical vital sign sensors?
• A person with congestive heart failure is sent home to recover. At any time, the disease can spiral out of control, but it may be days or weeks before the symptoms become bad enough to prompt a visit to the doctor, and by then further irreparable damage is done to the heart. What if tell-tale signs of an inicipient problem could be predicted by remote analytics using simple in-home vital sign measurements?
• A baby boomer suffers an episodic arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, but chalks up the bouts of tiredness to being out of shape or growing old. Meanwhile, his risk of having a stroke caused by the condition is increasing dramatically each season that passes. The stroke may kill him, or severely cripple him and require extensive and extended medical care. What if an inexpensive drug store device coupled to a web-based automated analysis could easily detect the condition and direct him to see his doctor?

The cost of being reactive hurts everyone: The patient, the hospital, the insurer and the government. A disproportionate fraction of healthcare costs are spent reacting to crises in a small population of the sickest patients. The current healthcare paradigm is oriented to coping with illness after it escalates.

At VG-BIO, we've witnessed the future of healthcare. Hospitals are going wireless, medical portals are opening all over the Web, implanted cardiac devices are sending data to doctors and the chronically ill are being sent home with vital sign devices to make and report their own measurements. Already, we are awash in data. What is needed to make the best and most cost-effective use of these investments in monitoring hardware is software analytics to convert the data to actionable intelligence.

Our goal is to deliver sophisticated algorithms in software tools that provide an automated, vigilant layer of initial data screening, identifying early the exceptional patient cases that require priority attention and intervention by medical staff. Health events are nipped in the bud and reactionary costs are avoided, even while extending the ability of medical staff to care for more patients. Patient quality-of-life is improved, even while costs are removed from the system.