Q: Can you tell us about your company and the challenges you are solving within the remote monitoring space?

A: Current Health provides an enterprise care-at-home platform that combines remote patient monitoring, telehealth and patient engagement into a single solution. Today, health systems have to navigate an extremely fragmented landscape of point solutions to deliver care outside their four walls. That’s why we’ve developed a unified platform to help them design new home-based care delivery models. 

As health systems look to deliver more care at home, our customers have expressed a need for an enterprise solution that can manage all patient populations across clinical conditions and acuity levels. To support this, we’ve designed every aspect of the platform–from device integrations to alarms–to be highly configurable. This means we can tailor a patient’s experience to support both hospital at home and chronic condition management, and even allow patients to easily step up and step down between programs.

On top of that, we know that many organizations are building (or re-building) their at-home care delivery models from the ground up. We can assist their efforts with end-to-end services to help them scale quickly. This includes things like full-service logistics, a 24/7 clinical command center and marketing services. We work as an extension of our customer’s team, fitting our technology and services into existing workflows where appropriate, or working with them to design new processes based on our experience.

Q: How does your company differentiate from other remote monitoring vendors?

A: First, our platform is highly configurable. While we have our own FDA cleared-continuous monitoring device, we are also device agnostic, which means we’ll integrate with third-party biosensors to capture data outside of our wearable. This allows us to care for patients across clinical conditions and acuity levels where continuous monitoring may not be necessary. In many cases, patients may start in a high-acuity program, such as hospital at home, using our continuous monitoring device, and then once they are discharged, step down to intermittent monitoring. This flexibility is what we believe will allow care-at-home programs to scale.

Second, we’re incredibly focused on making our platform accessible to all patients. We provide everything they need pre-configured with simple setup instructions, similar to the experience you have when you unbox a new iPhone. Our app comes in over 30 languages, which has allowed us to deploy global pharmaceutical clinical trials to diverse populations. We’re able to provide in-home connectivity and a tablet if a patient lacks WiFi or a smart device. All of this helps to facilitate greater patient enrollment and adherence in their program.

Third, we’re able to provide wrap-around services to help customers scale. One of the most difficult challenges of delivering care in the home is that last mile of care. We can provide full-service logistics and round-the-clock technical and clinical support. Now that Current Health is a Best Buy company, this capability is even greater, and we’re excited about the in-home support and distribution capabilities we will be able to provide our customers. 

Last, our Clinical Command Center helps fill gaps in staffing to enable 24/7 clinical monitoring. Our team of physicians, advanced practice providers and nurses are licensed in all 50 U.S. states and serve as a first line of clinical triage–responding to patient alarms, managing patient care and escalating to customers as necessary based on clinical protocols.

Q: What are some of the biggest changes your company has seen around how health systems are approaching remote monitoring since 2020?

A: Many health systems stood up pilot virtual care programs out of necessity in the early days of the pandemic. Since then, they’ve proven that home-based care can provide care that’s of equal quality, if not better. Now with encouragement from new reimbursement mechanisms and payment models, they’re looking to scale beyond their initial programs. As we move forward, we’re also seeing IT teams that want to create a consolidated technology stack for care-at-home.

There are more than enough technology solutions out there to help monitor, engage and manage patients at home. Now health systems are tasked with designing new workflows that weave these technologies into care models that they can sustain and scale. 

In early 2020, virtual care gained traction to respond to restrictions on in-person care during the pandemic. Now it’s a strategic imperative to help health systems manage long-term capacity and access issues.

Q: What does an ideal client look like? How are health systems best organized for success in remote monitoring?

A: In our experience, successful organizations are those that are prepared (and excited) to make meaningful changes to workflows in order to deliver more care at home. This means that before they purchase any technology, they have stakeholder buy-in from across the organization, including clinical leadership, their IT department, operations–even marketing. While we don’t expect workflows to be fully built prior to purchase of a technology (that’s a big part of our implementation work together), it’s much more productive when everyone is aware of the project and has bought into the solution before project kickoff. In addition to an aligned cross-functional team, it’s important to have a strong project manager or leader who can help guide the process through implementation and go-live.

Q: What measurable outcomes have you seen from your clients who have prioritized remote monitoring?

A: One organization using Current Health’s platform on a national scale to manage high-acuity patient care during COVID-19 saw the following results in  just 11 weeks:

• Decreased bed days for 62% of patients

• Elimination of 180 bed days 

• Overall cost savings of $908,000

• The majority–73% of patients–requested to re-enroll if given the opportunity 

One hospital at home program has proven that care-at-home can be just as safe, if not safer, for patients than being in the hospital. Key results after four months include:

• Average of 8 patients on census daily

• Approximately 5.6 days in the HAH program

• CLABSCI/CAUTI/CDiff incidents dropped to 0.0% 

• Fall rate of just 1.5% with no major injuries

• Only 9.2% of patients escalated back to brick-and-mortar

• Thirty-day readmission rate of 4.7%

One organization using Current Health to manage post-acute and chronic care patients saw the following results from the first 12 months:

• ER visits reduced by 21%

• Hospitalization rates reduced by 22%

• Expansion into more than 10 clinical use cases

Q: What major functional enhancements and/or product investments are you making in the near term to keep up with the evolution of remote monitoring?

A: Our near-term roadmap is broken into four key themes:

Deepen the breadth of patient observations. To support a broader range of clinical use cases among our customers, we are constantly expanding our ecosystem of third-party device integrations.

Double down on patient experience. This will include building out new ways to engage patients and their caregivers in their care journey.

Build a one-stop shop for care-at-home. This includes exploring deeper integrations with the EHR and creating more seamless workflows within our clinical dashboard.

Expand clinical risk estimation tools. We will continue to leverage captured clinical data and our in-house machine learning to expand our risk prediction tools.

Q: How is your company partnering with clients as reimbursements and use cases shift?

A: We have in-house reimbursement specialists who work with customers to ensure they are seeing the maximum benefit of their care-at-home program.There are a number of different levers that organizations have at their disposal to create value from delivering remote care at home, which vary greatly based on a health system’s unique pain points, patient population and risk contracts. We work with our customers to design solutions that meet their needs, whether it’s hospital at home, transitional care and/or chronic care management. This is just another reason why we’ve created a fully flexible system that customers can adapt as reimbursement models evolve.

Q: What are the biggest opportunities health systems should be thinking about this year when it comes to remote monitoring?

A: The ability to deliver care to patients in their homes has huge potential to solve so many issues, including capacity and provider burnout. We’ve heard from many nurses that virtual care technology has allowed them to re-focus on the patient and get more joy out of their day-to-day responsibilities.

Additionally, we also think there is a massive opportunity to improve access to care with this technology. We have seen our customers be successful in rural areas with limited connectivity or with patients who aren’t traditionally thought of as tech savvy. Once we can get rid of the stigma that virtual care is only for a privileged subset of the population, we’ll be better equipped to solve access issues and address many other social determinants of health.

We think there is an opportunity to broaden the interactions that health systems have with patients by providing the tools to connect with them in the home throughout their care journey. While many programs are focused on moving acute care episodes into the home, it shouldn’t stop there. There is huge value in continuing to care for those patients in a lower-touch way to help them navigate their health in the longer term.

Q: How do you see remote monitoring evolving in 2022 and beyond?

A: We predict a world where the majority of care is delivered in the home. The technology is there. Patients are now asking for it. And we’re seeing financial models move to meet the demand. Ultimately, it will lead to better access to high quality care that’s both convenient and lower in cost.