Health IT, Startups

Homeward Health developing a frailty tool, better assess at-risk patients

It will measure a patient’s gait and gestures.

There are notable changes on the horizon for Homeward Health, the early-stage company that uses visual, audio and touch interactions to better gather data from patients and increase the efficiency of patient management.

CEO Joseph Gough said Thursday during a pitch competition at the Louisville Innovation Summit that the company will soon re-brand to WellOp (think “wellness opportunity”). It’s also developing a new digital assessment tool that will use both gait and gestures from patients to measure their frailty.

Gough wouldn’t go into many details – saying only that the tool was being developed with the help of the product design firm IDEO. Like Homeward Health’s other products, the frailty tool would feed results into the cloud and be used with other Homeward Health tests to assess a patient’s health.

The Ohio-based startup has three products: tablet-based apps that let patients handle more of the discharge, extract data to pinpoint patients who are more likely to be re-admitted to a hospital, and provide better care for those at-risk patients as they go home.

The company earlier this year closed a $750,000 investment with Arsenal Capital Management