No hospital or health system wants to have high readmission rates. Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia was noticing its rates were noticeably increased for a certain group of individuals: liver failure patients.
“As you might anticipate, these are people who might be difficult to keep out of the hospital,” Dr. Richard Kalman, a hepatologist at Einstein, said in a phone interview. “Our readmission rate was hovering around 40 percent.”
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Thus, Einstein wanted to create a program specifically dedicated to decreasing readmissions for this particular patient population. To do so, it teamed up with Vivify Health, a Plano, Texas-based company that provides a remote care platform.
When asked what drew Einstein to Vivify as opposed to other vendors, Kalman highlighted the ease of use of its portal. Additionally, he noted that it’s relatively simple to create questionnaires tailored to each individual patient or patient group. For instance, if a patient says he or she sleeps less than six hours per night, the provider can create a sleep-related question in the Vivify platform particularly for that patient.
In pursuit of its goal, the medical center also teamed up with a local nursing association. The nurses are able to go to a patient’s home and help set up the remote monitoring device. Einstein hoped that coupling Vivify’s technology with nursing expertise would yield better results, Kalman said.
Initially, Einstein just used the Vivify approach as more of a proof of concept study by giving it to five patients. In April of this year, the medical center rolled it out more formally.
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The ultimate goal of the program is obviously to reduce the 30-day readmission rate. It’s still early in the process and thus too soon to tell, but Kalman said the initial data suggests Einstein is seeing a reduction. Plus, he noted that patients seem to be satisfied with the technology and the fact that their doctors are getting extra information about their health.
“Being able to allow our patients to communicate with us easily is the goal,” he said.
Looking ahead, Kalman is optimistic about remote monitoring both at Einstein and generally speaking.
“Telemedicine allows us to really be total care providers,” he said. “In a perfect world, we’d be able to get this data on everybody, not just people being discharged from the hospital.”
Photo: CherriesJD, Getty Images
