Two years ago, as reported in mHealth News, two New Jersey hospitals using DocView mHealth Solutions' text message-based platform reported no readmissions among 10 stage C heart failure patients over three months. Their conclusion? Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones.
Times have changed.
"Simple solutions don't necessarily work any more – they don't bend the curve much," Greg Westerbeck, DocView's CEO, now says. "Transitional care is slowly evolving (into something) that wasn't in place two years ago."
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Armed with a $400,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, Cherry Hill, N.J.-based DocView is joining longtime partner Atlantic Health, New Jersey-based transitional care provider Care One and Medtronic on a study of remote monitoring technology with 100 heart failure patients at the Thomas E. Reilly Heart Success Program at Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute, an Atlantic Health subsidiary. Their goal is to reduce the typical 25 percent readmission rate for patients with congestive heart disease to the single digits.
This involves connecting remote and home monitoring technology developed by Medtronic with DocView's newly patented Interactive Remote Disease Monitoring and Management System to create a daily checkup platform. The platform combines more robust mHealth monitoring with DocView's traditional messaging capabilities.
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"We're collecting behavioral data now, which is all a point of healing," says Lance Roman, the company's chief operating officer.
Westerbeck and Roman say simple communications platforms may have worked two years ago between the hospital and the home or the extended care facility, but more and more care is being delivered outside the hospital setting these days, as mHealth and telehealth technology can be used to pull in care team members no matter where they're located. That's even changing the definition of transitional care, moving away from simple post-acute care to one that incorporates wellness and health management.
"There are now multiple providers, patients (and care team members) in multiple locations," Westerbeck says. "Outside the hospital, the business cases are changing, and you're seeing more innovative models for transitional care, more monitoring, more devices. It changes our view of who we have to go after and connect."
While DocView is evolving, Westerbeck isn't seeing the same level of change in the healthcare industry's reimbursement policy.
"We're still living in a fee-based society, and we don't have a CPT code or a Medicare code that reimburses us for what we're doing," he says. "A lot of the people we're trying to work with can see the possibilities and the potential, but their hands are tied."
Which makes the current project, now in the patient recruitment stage, important.
"Basically, Verizon is asking if there's a better way to do transitional care with mobile technology," Roman says. "And Atlantic wants a model that can follow people from the hospital to the skilled facility to the home."
Westerbeck says DocView will be looking to broaden its horizons even further, finding new partnerships and disease states to target, perhaps even getting involved with some population health management programs.
"We can be supplemental to a lot of technologies," he says.
See also:
Does CMS need to improve telehealth reimbursement code?
