by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | December 11, 2014
From the December 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In response to this issue, Philips Healthcare is working with hospitals to develop community paramedic programs. Hospitals are starting to leverage their paramedics and emergency vehicles to treat patients in their homes instead of transporting them to the ED.
“The model has traditionally been very binary, which is, you either get treated in a hospital or doctor’s office or you call someone to transport you to a hospital. There has never really been a reliable middle ground,” said Dr. Anthony C. Jones, vice president and chief marketing officer of patient care and monitoring solutions at Philips. “But the incurred cost of too many people going to the emergency department is problematic and hospitals are now being held financially accountable to manage people’s care and not just the treatment.”
The programs are designed to try to find the best way for each facility to combine Philips’ EMS products including portable defibrillators, ventilators and patient monitors with telehealth solutions to communicate information back to the hospital.
“We’re looking at it from the solutions side and the technology side and our customers are looking at it from the workflow, financial and care side to really figure out the right mix and how to better equip those paramedics and improve the movement of data from them to the hospital,” said Jones.
In October, Philips got FDA approval for two of their telehealth applications called eCareCompanion and eCareCoordinator. The first application, eCareCompanion, works as a patient portal where patients can answer questions to monitor their health and request measurements from their physicians. It can also connect to medical devices including blood pressure machines.
The second, eCareCoordinator, provides physicians with population health management by providing a daily review of each of their patients. They also have real-time access to health data including vital signs and blood pressure and the responses to their patients’ health questionnaires. “That technology gives us the ability to spot a problem sooner before it gets out of control,” said Jones. “If you can do that and deploy a paramedic to actually stabilize the patient and not transport them, it has tremendous cost savings.”
This approach is a major paradigm shift for the industry. Instead of focusing on how quickly they can transport a patient to the hospital, they’re now focusing on developing solutions to avoid the trip altogether. “That is really where the industry is looking,” said Jones.
