Patient Engagement

Telehealth should prove valuable to rural and small city-dwelling patients who have to travel to get to the healthcare they need, says Wael A. Kabli, Cura CEO.

Neck-and-neck, the two rideshare companies are making big moves to assert themselves in the space, hiring health IT talent as providers and other vendors continue to partner.

The 22-year-old privacy law should be updated for a mobile tech-centric and data-driven world, the information management and medical informatics groups said.

Since opening its doors to the first patients in September this year, the New Children’s Hospital in Helsinki, Finland is using a unique combination of art and play, recognised as key elements for a “healing environment", and the latest technologies available to support the children that it provides services for and their parents. With a total budget of €183m, €40m from the state of Finland, another €40m from the hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa, and €38m raised by a Foundation created for the new facility, the hospital is cultivating a culture of innovation – and the HIMSS Insights team went to find out how.  In an interview published in the first issue of the new global Insights eBook series, Professor Pekka Lahdenne, Head of Digital and Innovative Services at the hospital, who specialises in Paediatrics, explained that an “efficient ICT infrastructure was a priority for future development of a modern hospital”. Webinar: Patient Engagement: Transforming the Patient Experience with Innovative Digital Services “A lot of effort was invested in ensuring that the ICT platform would provide capabilities for future developments,” Professor Lahdenne said.  The full interview can be read here. A site visit at the hospital will be organised during the HIMSS & Health 2.0 European conference taking place in Helsinki, Finland, on 11-13 June. Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

Dr. Shafi Ahmed, CMO, Medical Realities, says that providing patients with control of their data is essential and that smartphones are an indispensable tool for empowering the patient.

Dr. Manish Kohli, HIMSS Enterprise Board Chair, discusses physician burn-out and delivering insights for better clinical decision making, adding that success will come when the technology becomes invisible while patients are in front of doctors and nurses.

(Sponsored) Ali Slimani, Cerner's general manager of strategic partnerships for Middle East sales, says Cerner is aligned with IHI's "Quadruple Aim," which includes improving patient and clinician experience well as lowering overall cost of care.

Biofourmis, a Singapore-based health analytics platform, has entered into a collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, US to co-develop improvements to their proprietary analytics engine, Biovitals™ for Brigham’s Home Hospital Programme. Patients are cared for in their home instead of the hospital in Brigham’s Home Hospital Programme, with the aim of providing the right care to the patient at the right time and place. The Programme started in November 2016 and about 200 patients have been cared for from home so far. The process After a patient has been discharged from the hospital, a doctor or nurse meets the patient at his or her home and all diagnostic work are performed at home, such as blood tests, X-rays and ultrasounds. The patient’s vitals including heart and respiratory rate, as well as movement are monitored 24/7 with wireless monitoring technology. The patient is given an electronic tablet that allows him or her to communicate anytime with medical staff via phone, text or on-demand video. Many treatments, including medications, are administered at a patient’s bedside. Preliminary pilot data of nine patients who were randomised to receive care at home showed that the average direct cost for acute care episodes for home patients was up to half of the cost of the control patients cared for in the hospital. Webinar: Patient Engagement: Transforming the Patient Experience with Innovative Digital Services The collaboration between Biofourmis and Brigham and Women’s Hospital will harness and clinically utilise the vast quantity of biometric data that the home hospital team collects. The team plans use the Biovitals™ analytics engine and further innovate around new predictive algorithms. Unlike traditional threshold-based physiology monitoring, Biovitals™ uses advanced machine learning to learn a patient’s physiology and then dynamically build a personalised physiology signature that can detect subtle physiological changes that may predict a patient’s health. The programme would also use Biofourmis’ RhythmAnalytics™ platform to detect dozens of different cardiac arrhythmias. “Current remote monitoring systems are based on univariate physiology analysis and have shown high false alarm burden and no early intervention, especially while monitoring patients in an ambulatory setting. This collaboration would enable us to enhance and co-develop new predictive models for monitoring acutely ill patients’ suffering from multiple conditions like heart failure, pneumonia, COPD, and atrial fibrillation at-home, enabling clinicians to intervene early and improve the level of safety of patients,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, Founder & CEO of Biofourmis. “Our home hospital team is hoping to improve care for our patients by creating a suite of highly clinically-useful algorithms that can predict deterioration and improvement for those who are acutely ill,” said David Levine MD, MPH, MA, researcher and lead for Brigham and Women’s Home Hospital programme. In December 2017, Biofourmis announced that it had raised US$5.0 million in a Series A round of funding from NSI Ventures and Aviva Ventures, the strategic corporate venture arm of international insurer, Aviva plc. The company also entered into a collaboration with Mayo Clinic, which would enable them to assess de-identified healthcare data from clinical trials and Mayo’s expert medical insights.