It’s only been a few months since Covidien acquired wearable device maker Zephyr, but it’s already licensed the company’s biopatch to healthcare IT provider Geneia. It is the first deal of its kind for Geneia and is designed to support its new channel for home monitoring of patients, according to a company statement. Geneia will use ZephyrLIFE with @home to monitor patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, pneumonia and COPD. Capital BlueCross, which has more than 700,000 members, gets first crack at piloting @home to monitor patients with congestive heart failure.
In a phone interview, Geneia president and COO Heather Lavoie said the deal with Covidien, which is merging with Medtronic, marked a milestone for its business. She added that more deals with companies are likely to follow, particularly ones that can support machine learning to better understand and predict each patient’s needs and improve adherence for complex medication regimens.
“If you think about how tough it has been to improve care coordination in hospitals, think about how much more difficult doing this at [a patient’s] home is,” Lavoie said. “The solution we found was incredibly usable, with tight integration capabilities and would integrate well into our Theon application, so a nurse could pull in that data but also share it with other providers.”
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She said the company had been looking for partners that were not necessarily in the wearables business, but that could help support some of the problematic areas of healthcare that drive up costs. The company has been tackling such areas as poor management of chronic diseases, unnecessary readmissions and how to make aging in place possible in line with the shift in payment models to provide care in home settings.
“We knew for that to happen we needed strong technology that would be the least intrusive for patients but with the greatest usability for patients.”
The @home platform will integrate with Geneia’s Theon platform launched in July. The analytics tool helps providers in integrated systems manage care coordination by showing medical professionals which patients need help, when they need it, and what they need to improve their health. It also includes modules that highlight ways that costs can be reduced for each patient and provide risk management assessments to payers, providers and data analytics teams.
In a phone interview with MedCity News after the Zephyr acquisition, Rhonda Luniak, Covidien vice president of communications, said that although remote monitoring technology for hospitals is the big priority for its use of Zephyr, it’s also interested in how it can help physicians, clinicians and other caregivers with remote patient access at home.
