Mobile health business Practice Unite, which has added eight health systems and hospitals and four home healthcare agencies as customers in the past year, is moving into the remote monitoring business for geriatric care. It is providing the app to a consortium of home care groups, as part of a partnership between Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute and Independence Care System. It will deploy these customized home monitoring systems across New York City’s five boroughs next year.
The company developed several different applications within one app platform to make it easier for healthcare professionals to communicate.
In an interview with Chief Medical Officer and co-founder Stuart Hochron, he said it won the contract with the consortium because its platform is designed to be flexible and that’s a big deal in an environment “where the standard matrix is too fixed.” It is also rolling out an app to help care management teams know in realtime when beds are being vacated. Users can click on a bed and they’ll see one of a few different icons indicating the room is occupied, or the patient has been discharged and needs housekeeping, or the room is ready for a new patient. Bed management is viewed as a pain point by hospitals because in its current form it’s an inefficient process. An app that could let hospital staff know when housekeepers need to be deployed and when the room is ready could save time and money.
This week it plans to release a patient facing app with Jersey City Medical Center — a member of the Barnabas Health System that enables users to find a doctor, send messages back and forth with them, and provide feedback. Soon it hopes to add way for patients to navigate hospital corridors to get to their appointment on time through a combination of GPS and beacons. Hochron sees it as a “patient portal booster.”
The company is based at the NJIT Enterprise Development Center in Newark, New Jersey. To support the increase in customers it has grown staff from a team of four to 17.
In addition to outpatient care, the makers have marketed the platform as an effective way to communicate with caregivers in post acute care facilities such as nursing homes or rehabilitation facilities. The communication platform can also be integrated with lab reporting systems and radiology reporting systems. Physicians can receive clinical lab values and can respond faster. The idea is to reduce unnecessary re-admissions by catching potential problems early or avoiding the need to go to the hospital altogether.
Several companies are offering communication tools that respond to a desire to use smartphones but add a HIPAA compliant platform to make patient data secure. Startups and growth-stage companies in this sector such as Seratis, Cureatr and Voalte, are helping medical staff ditch their pagers to make communication faster and more efficient.
