ConnectedHealth device partner: Entra Health Systems
There's another new player in the burgeoning world of home-based connected health, and it's called, well, ConnectedHealth. The Singapore-based company is slowly entering the US market with a wireless platform for connecting customized, Continua-certified home monitoring devices.
ConnectedHealth and partner Sovran, an Oakland, Calif., company that offers medical transcription and custom software development services, showed their system at this week's Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) annual conference in Las Vegas.
Sovran wrote the firmware for a series of Bluetooth-enabled home medical devices, including a weight scale, blood-pressure cuff, glucometer and pulse oximeter. "We've built our own Bluetooth stack," Sovran principal Patrick Liu said at MGMA.
Each device transmits real-time data to a dedicated Android smartphone, which uploads readings to a Web portal that each patient's physicians and other caregivers can access. (The Android app and Web portal also are Sovran creations, and that company also is providing transcription services for ConnectedHealth.) "Data can also be piped to an EMR," Lui said, though that hasn't been done yet.
He said that one multispecialty practice in Southern California is testing the ConnectedHealth products with elderly and other patients with high-risk chronic diseases such as diabetes, congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
"The devices are meant to be easy to use," Liu said. Since the products have been designed for seniors, patients don't have to do anything they wouldn't do with traditional scales, glucose meters, oximeters or BP cuffs, but the computer-savvy have the option of logging onto the Web portal to monitor their own values. There is a one-click interface in the portal for patients or caregivers to order supplies such as glucose test strips, Liu added.
Offering the technology to physician practices is one strategy ConnectedHealth is pursuing in the U.S., a market that Liu admitted is "cloudy" right now. Other potential sales avenues include health insurers, large employers, hospitals and integrated delivery networks. The plan is to charge an unspecified monthly fee per user, according to Liu.
Health systems in particular should take an interested, according to Liu, with the advent of Accountable Care Organizations, the growth of bundled payments and Medicare's new policy that refuses to reimburse for certain preventable readmissions within 30 days of hospital discharge. "If you aren't being reimbursed, this is the perfect solution," Liu said.
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Click here for a video demo of ConnectedHealth's Home Diabetes Kit.
