Mobile health business Sense Health, which uses text messaging to help coach Medicaid patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions, has secured backing from The Nicholson Foundation for a 1,000 person study with patients from New Jersey-based CompleteCare. Its platform will be used for patients with diabetes and hypertension as well as to boost cervical cancer screening rates, according to a company statement.
The one-year study will assess the company’s technology to improve appointment adherence, disease specific clinical indicators, and healthcare utilization for its patients. The goal will be to assess to return on investment of its technology.
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The study will split the patients into two groups — one group will receive standard care management alone and another group will get care management as well as Sense Health’s platform. The company’s technology can be used on smartphones as well as flip phones.
CompleteCare is a federally qualified health center with 20 sites in southern New Jersey. In the statement, Barbara Kang, a senior program healthcare officer at The Nicholson Foundation said it was interested in Sense Health because its approach focuses on the needs of Medicaid patients, which can be complex. “There are growing numbers of healthcare technology solutions in the market place to help improve clinical outcome, but very few that focus on vulnerable populations.”
In a phone interview with CEO Stan Berkow, he said the company has tweaked its approach to give patients more control on topics for which they would prefer to receive more coaching. Berkow took part in a panel at South by Southwest earlier this month which focused on technology for underserved communities.
“People look at the Medicaid space as entirely unique…There’s not as much money invested in technology but a critical question is how can new technologies be built in a way that reaches this population?” He noted that some of the unmet needs for this patient population revolve around the social determinants of health such as transportation and job security.
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Sense Health participated in the New York Digital Health Accelerator last year and it currently works with health homes in New York state. Its technology currently supports 60,000 patients.