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.
Noom
Target Market: Noom Weight, a weight-loss coaching mobile application, grabbed the attention of both healthcare providers and payers when it achieved 10 million downloads with users losing, in aggregate, more than 30 million pounds. It is also the top grossing health and fitness application on Google Play for the last 18 months.
Leveraging that welcome attention from the industry, and with the help of a grant from the National Institutes for Health, Noom is testing an eating disorder application at Mt. Sinai in New York, for patients to use with their doctors. It will be targeted at payers and health systems in the hopes of delivering better care at a lower cost.
Offering: Noom is adapting its consumer-facing app and creating a coordination platform for providers and healthcare systems. The first such offering, as yet unnamed, was launched in the fall. It is an eating disorder management application with two components: a mobile app for the patient and a dashboard used by the doctor or therapist to review progress. The application is specifically targeted at binge eating and related disorders, complementing the current standard of care, cognitive behavioral therapy with guided self-help (CBT-GSH).
Benefits: “If we have the same people, creative software engineers, who build consumer healthcare tools working on serious applications to modify diet and exercise, it will be a boon to everyone in healthcare, offering life enhancing benefits to the patient while reducing costs to the healthcare system providers and payers,” said Ken Nesmith, vice president of product strategy.
This is the first time a company that has been so successful in the consumer world is adapting its technology for the healthcare world by creating a platform for interaction between patient and caregiver. They are doing so at just the right moment in time, when the industry is more interested than ever in using consumer-friendly software to improve patient health.
Price: The application will be distributed at no charge to patients with a fee-based model to payers and healthcare providers.
Co-founders: Saeju Jeong. At 19 years old, Jeong created BuyHard Productions, an independent music label chosen as the most promising e-business in Korea in 2001. After early success in Asia, he came to New York, where he was the sole representative of an international music company. Artem Petakov interned at Microsoft's SQL Server and Sun Solaris groups and won the Robocup World Championship in 2005. From 2005-2008, he founded and then led the User-Created Map Content team at Google, a project described as a "pioneering" effort that will "transform" GIS.
Funding: Noom recently closed $7 million in Series A funding. RRE Ventures led the round, with participation from TransLink Capital, Recruit Strategic Partners, Scrum Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Harbor Pacific Capital.
Ephraim Schwartz is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vt. Schwartz is a recognized mobile expert and columnist, having spent 15 years as Editor-at-Large for InfoWorld, half of them covering the mobile space. Prior to that he was Editor-in-Chief of Laptop Magazine.
