Mention a home-based telemonitoring solution, and the image that most often pops up is some obtrusive box that sits in the living room, sprouting more attachments than the Death Star and spewing out data like R2D2.
Intel-GE Care Innovations is aiming to change that with Connect RCM (Remote Care Management), a cloud-based application of the company's Care Innovations Guide platform that allows consumers and their caregivers to use their own mobile devices to communicate and coordinate care.
Company offices say the new platform, which has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, dramatically reduces the cost of home-based telemonitoring by eliminating the need for extra hardware and deployment.
"With Connect RCM, we¹re really turning telehealth on its head, elevating it to true population management that¹s scalable to hundreds of thousands of individuals and their family caregivers," said Louis Burns, Care Innovations' chief executive officer, in a recent press release. "The system¹s technical framework, which we call the Connect Care Delivery Architecture, will also serve as a backbone for upcoming clinical and non-clinical solutions in development so that we can reach across today¹s existing silos of care."
"This could mark the tipping point in telehealth adoption," added Harry Wang, director of research at Parks Associates, in the release, "Delivering the capabilities of telehealth and remote care management to care recipients via web browser will help healthcare organizations overcome some of the most common barriers to wide-scale adoption of telehealth across large populations, including high per-patient costs involving lengthy hardware deployments and inventory management."
Marcus Grindstaff, Care Innovations' director of strategic planning and product placement, said the company's goal was to "step back and … reduce the complexity" of deployment, so that providers could scale this platform out to more patients. The platform also enables patients to invite family caregivers through the Care Innovations Connect Caregiver portal, opening the process to the more than 40 million family caregivers in the United States who play a very active role in the healthcare process.
"This is a dramatically different experience from a logistics experience," he said. "It makes things so much easier (and) breaks down the silos of care" that have made home monitoring so complicated and expensive in the past.
Grindstaff said Connect RCM gives the consumer more of a role in home-based telemonitoring and pulls in all members of the care team, which in turn improves the patient's interactions with providers. The system supports manual entry of biometric data and can link to certain connected peripheral devices through the Care Innovations Guide home device.
He said the solution, which will be made available this fall to health networks and payers in the United States and rolled out to Canada and the United Kingdom next year, should be especially helpful to providers looking to improve the post-acute discharge process and reduce hospital readmissions, as well as those working with large populations of chronic care patients.
