There’s a new mobile healthcare software category in town: The care coordination platform.

Care coordination platform providers take wellness applications to the next level of patient engagement by integrating what the patient does with what caregivers need to know. In the process, the platform creates a unique kind of symbiosis where each member of the healthcare circle is able to adapt and react to the requirements of the other.

Although wellness apps are a dime a dozen, there are at present not a great many behavior change tools serving the needs of professional caregivers. But eCaring and Noom aim to change that, the former with its cloud-based home health monitoring service and the latter by cashing in on the success of its consumer-oriented app by bringing to market a platform for caregivers and providers.

Here's a look at the apps:

eCaring
Target market: Managed care organizations such as MLTC plans, payers, home health agencies, hospitals faced with current Medicare readmission penalties, Medicaid and Medicare dual-eligible programs, Accountable Care Organizations and medical homes. Organizations faced with new ACA and managed care mandates for living within capitated rates and those with risk responsibility for care and cost of care for their patients.

Offering: eCaring is a cloud-based, mobile home healthcare and monitoring platform that uses icons or symbols to enter information about care conditions and activities of the home care recipient on a standard tablet computer in real-time. It is designed for home aides with limited English skills or computer skills and is focused on healthcare providers getting actionable data to the care manager, such as a family member, primary care physician or a transition nurse.

The system is customizable and configurable, with templates for a given population and specifically selected data points and alerts to make it easier for a managed care organization to implement the system. For example, there is a plan of care for congestive heart failure (CHF) that includes an alert for sudden weight gain; in the case of diabetes, there's a plan for monitoring an alert for out-of-whack blood sugar levels.

Benefits: The biggest benefit is its ability to generate actionable information that keeps patients at home and out of the hospital. It also reduces readmissions, as well as the frequency of hospital visits.

At present there are approximately 9 million “dual eligibles,” patients who receive both Medicare and Medicaid benefits. According to Robert Herzog, the company's CEO and founder, eCaring is able to reduce the cost of treating dual eligibles by $2,500 per-patient per-month when compared to traditional home care, which could take a chunk out of the $300 billion per year spent on them.

By generating a great deal of information in real time, everything from eating patterns to toileting, the system integrates behavioral and clinical data to keep small issues from ballooning into larger problems that would require a hospital admission.

In a small study, eCaring’s CHF module was evaluated against typical paper-based reporting methods with the readmission rates for the paper system at 29 percent while the readmission rate for those using eCaring was 10.5 percent, according to Herzog.

“If a CHF patient gains two pounds in a day it is a bad sign,” Herzog said. “Using our system the care team can take immediate remedial action and keep the patient at home.”

Although difficult to quantify as a standalone metric, the quality of service the home care aide provides is most likely brought to a higher level by incorporating a software design that accommodates the aide’s current language and computer capabilities, thus empowering the home aide to enter information and to become a more integrated part of the active care team.

Price: Core model is software-as-a-service with fees based on number of subscribers per month. Many installs are low-income households with no Internet device. The fees can include the deployment of Internet connectivity, tablet computers and software, as well as a mobile device management system.  

Founder: Robert Herzog. Served as a senior executive with startup companies such as Motionbox, Diva, ON2 Corp, Softcom, Granite Films and City Winery; major corporations including JPMorgan Chase, Cahners Communications and the Sarnoff Research Center; and not-for-profits including New Jersey Appleseed and Ecotrust. 

Current Funding: Emerging from startup stage. Privately funded, raised in two major rounds, $4.5 million for company seed and now $3.5 million series A funding.