Demo Video
Former CEO of VoCare Dr. Ben Park, presents the Vitals360™ and talks about benefits, uses and deployment of this revolutionary medical device.
REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING
Remote patient monitoring detects when there has been a deterioration in a vital parameter. This is an important first step, but once a clinician is alerted to the deterioration, they must determine why there is a deterioration and what needs to be done. Monitoring is not useful without taking the next steps of diagnosis and treatment. If these steps are not taken quickly, the patient may deteriorate further and quickly get into trouble, with the outcome being death or a trip to the hospital.
Avoiding bad outcomes is an important reason for monitoring. Telehealth allows you to rapidly assess the patient and institute therapies to get them back on track. Everyone who is monitoring their patients should also offer immediate access to a telehealth visit.
Another important reason for monitoring is to improve long-term control of vital parameters such as blood pressure. While it is not an emergency when someone’s blood pressure is 150/95, this is not a reading you want to ignore. Telehealth provides the option of making adjustments to treatment without having the patient come in for an in-person visit.
TELEHEALTH
Telehealth was designed and largely used for low acuity acute care. During the pandemic, telehealth was pressed into service for remote management of chronic disease. A critical missing component when remotely managing complicated patients with multiple chronic illnesses is an accurate set of vitals. Telehealth providers are working around this problem by asking patients to take vital readings and provide them to the clinician, slowing down the visit, and introducing potential transcription errors during entry with devices that may or may not be FDA cleared.
Having a reliable set of vitals greatly expands the number and types of patients a clinician can manage remotely. Vitals360® is a single device uniquely capable of capturing vitals and providing telehealth capabilities. Vitals360® opens telehealth to patients with multiple chronic illnesses. These are the most expensive patients and the ones least able to come to the office for a visit.
POINT OF CARE VITALS
Multiple times every day when you are in a hospital, and every time you visit a clinic, urgent care, or emergency room, someone takes your vital signs. In the hospital, the nurse pushes a COW (Cart on Wheels) down the hallway with devices to gather your vitals and upload them to the electronic chart. In clinics, they often take them manually and manually enter them, introducing potential transcription errors.
VoCare Vitals360® connects to electronic charts and easily uploads the data into the record, saving time and avoiding transcription errors. Vitals360® is less expensive than current solutions, easier to use, and works in all environments.
Vitals360® is an excellent solution for Point of Care, Remote Monitoring, and Telehealth. When used for all three, the synergies are amazing. An issue that every RPM company faces is training and support, particularly for those who use multiple connected devices. Vitals360® obviously solves the multiple connected device problem.
When deployed for all three use cases, it also solves the training and support issues. How? Imagine you are being discharged from a hospital or are seeing your doctor in the clinic because your chronic condition is worse. The nurse comes in to check your vitals before you leave, only this time the nurse asks you to pay attention while your vitals are measured because the physician wants you to measure your own vitals at home. When your vitals are complete, the nurse gives you a Vitals360® device that looks identical to the one which just measured your vitals and ask you to check your own vitals.
If you have any problems, the nurse is there to help you. You are now trained. If you have any problems with the device, once you are home, the nurse tells you to call.
The clinic or hospital has an endless supply of “trainers” and “support personnel” because they use the Vitals360® device every day as part of their job. The patients are used to calling the nurse for med refills and other problems, so nothing changes for the patient.
When providers use Vitals360® in all environments, it reduces the need for training, integrates support into existing infrastructure, increases the volume discounts available to providers, and strengthens the relationship between VoCare and the provider organization. This is a win for everyone involved.
1. Single Test Mode
This mimics standard medical devices. The Vitals360 can be used by any clinician without patient registration, as a convenient multi-diagnostic device for immediately spot-checking vital healthcare information.
2. Point of Care Mode
- This mode can be used by clinicians caring for multiple patients. In this mode, the Vitals360 replaces a number of separate medical devices, making it ideal for care both inside and outside of an office or facility.
- Unlike other medical devices that require manual entry of data, the Vitals360 can be linked directly to the HIPAA-compliant VoCare Cloud via 4G LTE cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity to allow patient data to be automatically uploaded after every use.
- Additionally, the Vitals360’s GPS location and time-stamping provide a superior audit trail for Medicare reimbursement.
3. Remote Patient Monitoring
- The Vitals360 is simple enough for any patient to use on his or her own, and provides a comprehensive view of the patient’s overall health from their own home. Patients no longer have to keep track of multiple devices, nor do they have to do cumbersome manual logging of their vital signs.
- In Remote Mode, patients can use the Vitals360’s video feature to conduct convenient telehealth visits right on the device.
The Vitals360®
device offers a clear choice
- Our strategy is to innovate and improve our value to the population our customers serve and continue to drive down total cost of ownership through the VoCare solution. We make integration, deployment and maintenance something our customers do not have to worry about.
- Our customers are remote patient monitoring (RPM) companies and Telehealth (Tele) companies. RPM companies have two very different approaches to remote patient monitoring. One strategy seeks to manage the health of populations to drive down the total cost of care and benefit from the savings. The other strategy is to generate earnings from the fees Medicare pays for remote patient monitoring and chronic care management. These strategies are not mutually exclusive but most companies in the RPM/Tele space tend to focus more on one than the other.
- VoCare is a tool supplier for organizations committed to managing the health of populations. Our products are not the lowest priced, but they are the highest value and have the lowest total cost of ownership. The VoCare approach serves the needs of RPM/Tele companies whether they seek to drive down total cost of care or generate Medicare fees from RPM/Tele. There are some special factors that only apply to organizations seeking to reduce total cost of care, but VoCare’s focus on these organizations benefits RPM/Tele companies with either strategy.
- By providing a turnkey device solution we make it easy for telehealth companies to offer RPM services and for existing companies in the RPM/Tele space to streamline their processes and improve their efficiency. When a company is able to provide RPM more efficiently they are able to monitor a larger pool of patients, digging deeper into the risk pool as you will see.
- RPM/Tele companies must make decisions about what patients they will monitor. To make this simple we will only look at potentially avoidable hospitalizations. The return on preventing a hospitalization is large, measureable and immediate.
- Organizations deploying RPM/Tele are essentially placing a bet that for a given population of patients the savings in reduced cost will exceed the cost of RPM. In order to make this bet these organizations must know four things. One, what is the likelihood of the patient suffering a preventable hospitalization. Two, what is the effectiveness of measures to prevent this hospitalization. Three, what is the cost of the intervention. Four what is the cost of detecting a preventable hospitalization.
- Most patients in the population will not suffer a hospitalization with or without monitoring. To detect those at risk for hospitalization you must monitor the portion of the population where RPM will produce a return on the RPM investment.
- The less the total cost of RPM the larger the portion of the population you can monitor as you seek to reduce costs. At some point the cost of monitoring will exceed the savings. There are many ways to select a subset of the population for monitoring. Some produce a return while others do not.
- The top 10% of most expensive patients spend more than half of the total dollars. Many organizations have tried focusing on these top spenders, but have been disappointed by the results. The reason is that this subset of the population changes. Only one quarter (2.5%) remain in the most expensive category. The other three quarters change from year to year. The one quarter that remains has conditions that cannot be improved and will continue to be expensive. This is a poor strategy.
- There are better alternative ways to select a population to monitor. These involve identifying subsets of the population that are likely to become high cost. As an example let’s look at the following graph showing potentially preventable hospitalization per 1,000 patients by setting of care. Monitoring the patients in home health would be a good strategy.
Distribution of Medicare Fee-For-Service Beneficiaries
and Medicare Spending by number of
Chronic Conditions
- There are no RPM/Tele companies that I know of who monitor 17% of their patients, even though they should. The potential cost advantages that VoCare provides will allow these companies to generate a return on monitoring on a larger population increasing revenue for the RPM/Tele while reducing total cost of care.
- How does VoCare enable lower cost RPM/Tele? To answer this question you must understand the ultimate consumer of RPM/Tele services. These are people who are in poor health and for the most part old, poor, poorly educated and technology illiterate. They are not iPhone users. They don’t have a smart phone and many do not have cell phones. Imagine installing a typical RPM/Tele solution in the home of one of these patients. You register a tablet to the patient, pair the oximeter, the blood pressure cuff and any other peripherals you want. You then ship this to the patient with instructions on how to initiate a RPM/Tele session. This initial session may or may not be successful. If it is not you direct the patient to a call center for help. If that does not work then you send someone to the home to help with the set up. Once you get everything working you have the issues of support including failure of one of the devices or a problem with Bluetooth pairing. The various manufacturers of these various peripherals may upgrade their devices requiring the RPM company to support
- In order to support these devices you have to build an entire support organization, at significant cost. Companies that use this solution will not be able to compete against companies using the VoCare solution with their much lower cost support structure.
- VoCare enjoys another significant cost advantage. One of the VoCare executives comes to VoCare from the Telecommunication industry. With his experience, connections in the industry, and experience with pricing and purchase options he has negotiated a very favorable and likely to improve with volume, contract for telecommunication services.
- Our devices will receive over the air software updates. We have complete control of these updates as does Verizon and other carriers. We do not have to worry about someone else’s update breaking our functionality.
- Multiple models of the devices. When you add up all the personnel costs they quickly dwarf the cost of the device.
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