Some 1,000 patients with COPD are using a mobile health platform to keep in touch with their physicians in a remote monitoring study that aims to identify problems before they lead to medical intervention.
The California-based CareMore Health System has launched a year-long study that will use Sentrian's Remote Patient Intelligence (RPI) platform to monitor the participants. The Scripps Translational Science Institute, meanwhile, is analyzing the data collected by Sentrian's platform to determine what triggers can be identified in each patient with COPD before he or she requires hospitalization.
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Considering that some 13 million Americans are diagnosed with COPD, it's the third leading cause of death in the nation and that one of every 11 people with COPD returns to the hospital within 30 days of a previous visit, this study could go a long way toward proving the value on mHealth in reducing costly hospital readmissions.
The key, say officials involved with the study, is in using remote devices and analytics to identify the right patients for the study, and to pinpoint their individual characteristics – in essence, taking a population health platform and drilling down to each individual patient.
"We're handling large volumes of data," David Ramirez, MD, CareMore's chief medical officer and vice president of clinical quality, told mHealth News. "We need to use the technology to filter it in a smart way."
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Many home monitoring studies undertaken in the past relied on pulling data from populations of patients and sorting it into usable chunks. But because patients with COPD and other chronic diseases often have more than one health issue, what works for one patient won't work for another. This leads to a platform that fields a lot of false alerts and incomplete data.
Marty Kohn, Sentrian's chief medical scientist (and a former IBM executive who worked on Watson), said machine-to-machine learning technology has evolved to a point where it can now handle complex chronic disease cases, giving providers a chance to manage a population while accounting for individual characteristics.
"We take advantage of the rapid evolution of these monitoring devices … to look at (home monitoring) in a more complex fashion," he said. "It also means we can collect more data at different times and be less intrusive to the patient."
More importantly, Ramirez said, the platform allows care providers to be proactive, rather than reacting to a change in a patient's condition that indicates a serious health concern is already underway.
"Our goal here is not to identify patients who are already ill," but to identify them before they become ill, he said. "It's a fundamental change to what has been done before."
San Diego-based STSI is focused on the analytics. It's part of the institute's ongoing effort to use mHealth to find platforms that deliver targeted care to a consumer.
“This research collaboration with Sentrian and CareMore fits nicely with our mission at Scripps to study the latest advances in digital medicine technologies as part of our effort to replace traditional one-size-fits-all medicine with precision healthcare and to accelerate patient access to effective new approaches to treating illnesses,” Steven Steinhubl, MD, STSI's director of digital medicine, said in a press release.
“Millions of hospitalizations and tens of billions of dollars in cost could be avoided if we can detect health deterioration in patients with complex chronic disease days in advance," added Dean Sawyer, Sentrian's CEO, in the release. "By working with scientific and healthcare leaders like Scripps and CareMore, I believe we can significantly reduce hospitalization and move toward the triple aim of healthcare – to simultaneously reduce cost, improve outcomes and improve patient satisfaction."
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