I have posted a number of notes about health wearables and monitors (see, for example: Is Healthcare Ready to Embrace the Consumer "Wearable" Revolution?; AT&T Offers the LTE-M, Low-Powered Network for Uploading Wearable Health Data). These devices will have a major effect on both healthy consumers as well as the chronically ill. In the former case, wearables can be used to monitor daily activities and, using various types of descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics, will guide consumers in their pursuit of wellness (see: Healthcare Will Contribute a Sizable Portion of Future Earnings for Apple). For the chronically ill, wearables will monitor them both during hospital stays and after they are discharged to their homes. A recent article discussed such a device that has now been approved by the FDA (see: A machine learning device, meant to monitor the chronically ill, moves into homes), Below is an excerpt from the article:
A wearable device that uses machine learning to remotely track and analyze multiple vital signs has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, expanding the scope of home monitoring systems intended to keep chronically ill patients out of the hospital. Current Health...announced...it received clearance for an upper-arm wearable that measures a patient’s respiration, pulse, oxygen saturation, temperature and mobility. The product is capable of delivering continual updates on a patient so doctors can intervene quickly if the data signal an emerging problem. The device, called Current, is already used in hospitals, and the clearance means it can monitor patients at home, in between visits with their doctors. It uses machine learning to analyze the data it collects and notifies doctors of problematic changes on their mobile devices or in electronic health records.
[Current Health's CEO] said the device is most commonly used by patients with heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, conditions that come with high rates of hospitalization and significant costs....Hospitals face financial penalties for racking up excess readmissions of heart failure patients, an initiative that has encouraged many providers to deploy remote monitoring tools to keep tabs on their conditions. The technologies are also gaining traction because health systems are increasingly able to incorporate the data into their electronic health records and other IT systems....Current Health’s device is designed to be used in consultation with doctors, who work with the company to determine what changes in the data should trigger a notification. In the future, he said, the company wants to further automate the process by using the data to predict when a patient is about to decline, rather than providing just the threshold data requested by physicians. But that capability depends on the company collecting more data on users and refining its algorithms.
Generally speaking, health systems tend to be less focused on wellness than the diagnosis and treatment of disease. For the latter services, they are better compensated and physician training also drives them in this direction. Treatment of patents with chronic diseases is a special challenge. One part of this challenge is that inpatient care is very expensive because it's labor intensive with care delivered by highly reimbursed professionals like physicians and nurses. Hospital executives prefer to discharge patients with chronic diseases as soon as possible because length-of-stay (LOS) is closely monitored. However, payers like CMS also penalizes them for discharges that are premature and result in rapid readmission.
The appeal of monitoring wearables like the Current Health device described above is that the cost of the device worn during both an inpatient stay and when discharged to home is trivial compared to the labor costs that hospitals would bear for inpatient care. If a patient suffers a relapse at home and the hospital is alerted via the wearable, health personnel can be quickly dispatched and readmission can be possibly be avoided. Monitoring of the copious data generated by devices like Current will be based on computerized analytics and therefore relatively inexpensive.
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