A mobile health startup that’s been working with DaVita’s care management subsidiary Village Health has expanded its collaboration with the company across its outpatient dialysis centers and its managed care business Healthcare Partners. The deal will expand the use of Cureatr’s care coordination tools to thousands of clinicians.
“It’s a unique deal for us as a company in the mobile care coordination space,” said Dr. Joseph Mayer the founder and CEO of Cureatr in a phone interview. “It’s exciting for us but it will also help a lot of patients.”
Although Mayer said it hasn’t customized elements of its platform for DaVita, he did say that DaVita has influenced how its communication tool can integrate with hospital’s medical records system. It can look up patient records and a doctor could send a message about that patient to a colleague. It has also worked with DaVita to create a library of workflows, including collaborative checklists.
“DaVita has forced us to accelerate our technology and makes us a much stronger company.”
Mayer also offered an example of how DaVita is using its technology.
If a patient misses a dialysis outclinic treatment, doesn’t feel well and gets transported to the hospital, they’ll be put on emergency dialysis. Using Cureatr’s platform, the dialysis nurse could contact a DaVita clinician or another member of the care team, notify them that the patient has missed a treatment. A DaVita care coordination team member could ensure patients get their medication and offer up some potential alternatives, depending on the patient’ condition. Instead of admitting the patient they might opt to send them to a DaVita outpatient center, depending on how the patient is doing. It could reduce the cost of care in some situations by avoiding hospitalization if it can improve communication between the two groups of healthcare professionals. Of course, this example would entail the hospital being a Cureatr partner as well.
Among its other hospital partners are Penn Medicine, Mount Sinai and Albany Medical Center.
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.
