Early in the 12th annual Connected Health Symposium in Boston, Dr. Stanley Shaw, co-director of the Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH) at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that practitioners are fine patient-generated data as long as it’s relevant and not overwhelming. “Physicians don’t need all the data. They just need the right data at the right time to take action,” Shaw said.
As the event was winding down Friday afternoon, the issue came up again. “Fear of data, I can tell you that it’s real,” said Dr. Richard Milani, chief clinical transformation officer at Ochsner Health System. Not only are clinicians wary of a deluge and the accuracy data from patients, health systems are fearful of liability issues from acting on such information, Milani said.
Ochsner has implemented two digital health programs in the last couple of years to take advantage of patient-generated data.
The Louisiana institution started collecting data about lifestyle and home environments from patients upon admission to help reduce length of stay and cut hospital readmissions. Milani helped create a dashboard for a care team to track patients and intervene if necessary.
In a focus group of patients with congestive heart failure, the effort has cut readmissions by 45-50 percent, Milani reported. “What we found was that the single biggest factor in readmissions was social,” he said. In many cases, people lacked transportation for follow-up care or didn’t have anyone to watch after them at home, so Ochsner made sure to arrange rides or send caregivers for high-risk patients.
This year, Ochsner launched a program for patients who had uncontrolled hypertension for at least a year. “They got armed with a wireless cuff” to track blood pressure, Milani said. Participants have to agree to send data at least once a week, and they were encouraged to upload readings 3-4 times weekly.
“We’re seeing robust amount of data,” Milani said. They’re also seeing positive results. After 90 days, about 62 percent of the group had their hypertension under control.
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.
Photo: Flickr user Louise Docker
