Philips' telemedicine division inked a three-year deal with the Sun Belt home care system SunCrest Healthcare, Inc., the company announced Wednesday.

Philips will provide the Madison, Tenn.-based agency with telehealth suites for allowing home monitoring of patients, including telehealth readers, pulse-taking devices, scales, glucose meters and pulse oximeters, all wired to send information to nurses or clinicians for daily observation.

Philips began introducing the program in December, according to Mike Lemnitzer, senior director of Philips Telehealth Solutions.

"They've already launched and expanded," he tells DOTmed News. "SunCrest had a very good process in place. They knew where they wanted to go."

SunCrest works with local hospitals to provide home-monitoring to patients with chronic illnesses in six states, mostly in the South.

REDUCING ADMISSIONS, REDUCING COSTS

According to Philips, the attraction for telehealth is, in part, that it can help lower hospital admission rates, and therefore costs, for health care centers and home-care agencies. In one 2007-2008 study provided by the company, researchers found hospitalizations and emergency-room visits at a North Carolina hospital declined around 70 percent among home-care patients in the six months after Philips' telehealth adoption.

This is especially critical for heart failure patients, the group Lemnitzer says it likely works best for. They have known high avoidable readmission rates, and Lemnitzer says some estimate that seven out of 10 readmissions for heart failure can be prevented.

"You have good indicators. They're gaining weight, they have high blood pressure. If you're monitoring those and you intervene, you'll get better outcomes," he says.

Plus, thanks to the way the software works, fewer case-managers could manage more patients, while cutting down on unneeded home visits. "You could replace one or two visits by tracking vitals and tracking compliance," Lemnitzer says.

HOW IT WORKS

The software "manages by the exception," as Lemnitzer puts it. When the nurse or clinician logs into the web portal, a screen summarizes all patient home readings -- such as blood pressure or glucose levels. These readings are color-coded, with green indicating healthy and compliant readings, yellow ones that should have been sent in but weren't yet, and red results that are outside of a specified safety range.

This lets the health care practitioners focus on the patients in the red, the danger zone, and to intervene to prevent conditions from worsening to the point of hospitalization.

TRAINING AND COMPLIANCE

But no matter how good the system is, it's worthless if no one participates. Lemnitzer says thanks to ease-of-use of the home-care system, such as simple devices with big buttons, compliance by patients is usually around 90 percent. And training of staff takes only a couple of days, though it usually requires several weeks of preparation -- developing a marketing plan, discovering patient workflow, and other minutiae.

With over 100,000 patients relaying vital signs to over 100 monitoring locations, Lemnitzer believes the telehealth program, which started in 2000 but only began to reach the home-care market in the last four or five years, should see plenty of growth.

"The focus today is on finding ways to reduce [hospital] admissions. It's fitting well into how we're developing our business line," he says. "We definitely see a bright future for ourselves."

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