A readmission risk assessment tool and two diabetes education programs will now be put to the ultimate reality check: patients.
The winner of the Janssen Connected Care Challenge and finalists in Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge will use their winnings to test their solutions for reducing healthcare costs in hospitals and communities.
RightCare Solutions‘ tool for tracking patients at risk for being readmitted to the hospital has won $100,000 in the Janssen competition.
The concept focuses on identifying vulnerable patients when they’re admitted rather than when they’re discharged. It uses a scoring system to identify patients who should be referred for post-acute services to prevent readmission. The questions are administered by nurses and discharge planners, and patients are referred for post-acute care support if their responses trigger an alert.
RightCare Solutions will use the money to support the build-out of the D2S2 software and run a pilot at four hospitals. It is also developing a second-generation tool to identify where to refer patients at high risk of 30-day readmissions, such as home care, skilled nursing facility, rehabilitation, or nursing home. University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing associate professor Kathy Bowles and Eric Heil, a second-year Wharton MBA student and associate at Domain Associates, lead the company.
Janssen Innovation is part of Janssen’s Research and Development Division and is a division of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ).
RightCare
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
EnduringFX and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging (N4A) have moved into the final round of the Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge, sponsored by Sanofi (NYSE:SNY). The teams will get $10,000 each to test their programs in a community. They will be judged by how well people with diabetes receive their ideas and how they tweak their programs in response to feedback from the community, among other criteria. The final winner will be announced in July and win $100,000.
Jim Stritzinger of EnduringFX
N4A
