Q&A with Matthew Sappern of PeriGen: Making childbirth safer

AVIA Connect provides accurate, unbiased information about digital health companies and solutions so that hospitals and health systems are empowered to choose products to fit their needs, budgets, and patient populations. We asked the top remote monitoring companies about their solutions and what they think the future of digital health looks like. No sponsored content or advertorials—just transparency and insights that decision-makers can use.  

PeriGen’s goal: To help clinicians spend less time on manual calculations and checklists and more time on direct patient care. Their AI-powered perinatal software solutions use advanced data analysis and customizable parameters and notifications to enhance clinical efficiency, standardize care across enterprises and provide critical early warning when problems arise during childbirth. With its built-in telemonitoring capabilities, PeriGen allows clinicians to monitor patients across multiple sites from a central location, with automated workflows and options that make data manipulation easier.

 

CEO Matthew Sappern joined PeriGen in 2012 and in the ensuing decade, has shepherded the company through a period of dynamic growth and innovation that included multiple patents and FDA-cleared medical devices. Prior to his tenure at PeriGen, Sappern served as a corporate officer at the Eclipsys Corporation, helping lead the company through its merger with Allscripts. He’s also an Emory University graduate and moonlights as a professional musician whenever he gets the chance.


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

A: PeriGen exists to make childbirth safer. Multiple studies show that for many years, more than half of the poor outcomes in full-term childbirth--for mothers and babies--have been preventable. Unfortunately, as risk managers, patient quality officers and lawyers will attest, these events were often related to failures to detect or escalate abnormalities that persist or worsen over time. 

PeriGen’s Vigilance early warning system uses FDA-cleared AI to detect these problematic patterns and trends. Because the system is continuously monitoring both mom and baby and not reliant on the subjective assessments of any single nurse, Vigilance provides an objective, quantifiable and timely assessment of how mom and baby are tolerating labor. This automated assessment helps clinicians stay alert about potential problems, supports clinicians at any experience level, and eases the workload when staff is stretched thin. It also improves communication among clinicians, midwives and providers.

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

A: PeriGen Vigilance is designed to operate in a setting where adverse events—despite being highly impactful--are not frequent, which can make them challenging for clinicians to consistently identify. In these situations, automated pattern recognition is vital if we want to identify a few needles in a very big haystack. This exception-based automation increases the efficacy of patient monitoring and improves scalability, so that one individual can monitor many patients at once. Given the shortage of nurses and consolidation of hospitals over larger areas, this kind of scalability is increasingly critical.

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

A: Not surprisingly, reimbursement has facilitated wider adoption. Inexplicably, this reimbursement has not yet made its way to obstetrics, despite the well-publicized access challenges to maternity care. I believe health systems realize that remote patient monitoring for both inpatient and ambulatory care is the only way healthcare becomes sustainable, given the expense and shortage of caregivers.

Q: What does an ideal client look like? How can health systems organize for success when it comes to remote monitoring?

A: PeriGen’s best clients have leadership at the highest levels that refuse to perpetuate the status quo.  Improvement requires change, and humans tend to be change-averse. Leaders who will no longer accept avoidable bad outcomes, and instead advocate and insist upon change--these are ideal PeriGen customers.

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

A: A number of PeriGen customers report reductions in adverse events like prolonged uterine tachysystole and labors that wallow in category two for hours. More directly, there are published studies showing reduced unanticipated transfers to the NICU, which is now a Joint Commission reporting metric. Anecdotally, most customers report improved nurse/physician communication.

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: PeriGen is piloting a tech-enabled service to provide remote perinatal patient monitoring for customers that want to quickly add a safety layer to their operations without having to stand up their own central monitoring operation.

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

A: Reimbursements and risk-sharing are just starting to come to fruition in obstetrics, and we welcome that.  We believe in our technology, we’ve seen great results, and we look forward to emerging value-based care.

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

A: Using emerging technology to strategically augment care models will help insulate from staff shortages and help bring care to the patient regardless of setting.

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

A: More available technologies that, cost-effectively and at scale, move beyond the established tele-ICU and tele-stroke models.

 

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