Remote Patient Monitoring
A high proportion of healthcare costs are spent on patients with chronic diseases.
These patients suffer from conditions that can rapidly escalate to health crises at any time. However, it can be weeks, months or years before that might occur, so it doesn't make sense to keep such patients hospitalized. Yet, sending such a patient home to self-monitor runs the risk that his or her condition will deteriorate to an expensive healthcare crisis event before the patient calls for medical assistance.
In recent years, remote medical monitoring (sometimes called Telehealth or Telemedicine) that was originally designed to provide outreach for isolated rural patients, has evolved into a general proposition for better, more cost-effective care of the chronically ill, the elderly and recuperating patients in all out-clinic contexts. Patients are provided with biosignal measurement devices they can use themselves at home that report the data to a central repository for physician review. Implanted devices (such as an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator or ICD) are also increasingly designed to report in situ data via passive radio frequency polling. By these means, the nurse or physician can be apprised remotely of daily or hourly vital signs and health indicators.
Deteriorating patient health can be identified before it becomes a crisis.
Recent technology advances have greatly facilitated this approach, including cheaper and more powerful processors in the devices, better sensors, and ubiquitous connectivity via internet and cellular networks. Remote patient monitoring is poised to make a potentially tremendous impact on the cost and quality of patient care. However, to become a truly cost competitive alternative to the current situation, automated monitoring software such as VG-BIO's SBM technology is needed to intelligently digest the flood of data that will be produced by remote patient management. Manual monitoring by medical staff is simply untenable.
Candidate conditions for monitoring of patients remotely include some of the most significant and costly diseases in the population:
- Congestive heart failure
- Asthma/Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- Diabetes/Obesity
- Cardiac arrhythmias
- Alzheimer's/dementia
- Sleep disorders
- HIV/AIDS
- Post-operative recuperation
Our intelligent monitoring algorithms can be layered over any telehealth data collection system.
Data is processed through our system (in parallel with any other analysis or display functions in the system) as a first-pass filter for incipient health events. We are working to demonstrate that using our advanced approach to predictive analytics provides tremendous leverage for nurses and physicians to manage more patients more effectively, and with better outcomes.