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Americans with chronic illness account for over 75% of total healthcare costs in the U.S.
Health & Wellness Promotion and a Disease Self-Management Imperative
REMEDY™ is free of charge for use by healthcare professionals in the administration and monitoring to their patients for health, wellness and disease management programs. It provides healthcare with a powerful means to control costs and improve the delivery of care. Whether it is used to digitize an existing health, wellness or disease management program for greater effectiveness and efficiencies or if it is to initiate the implementation of such a program, REMEDY™ will provide a cogent benefit-to-cost ratio in hard dollar costs and patient quality of life improvement.
Savings of more than 10 times the cost of the programs. Studies funded by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality ( www.ahrq.gov) demonstrated overall savings in healthcare costs in the utilization of chronic disease self-management programs were more than 10 times the cost of the programs themselves. These programs were enabled without the cost efficiency benefits of technology which would have saved the programs additional monies in the labor intensive administration of such systems.
Physicians Practice Patterns do Not Change
REMEDY 's adaptive functionality means that physicians do not have to change their practice patterns in order to use the solution. It simply automates the connection, collection and direction of patient care for a more cost-efficient and effective delivery of healthcare services. Some examples are:
- Automated Exception Alerts to Designated Members in a Patients Circle-of-Care
- Automated Notifications to Remind Patients to Adhere to Prescribed Health Regimen
- Automated Means to Aggregate, Track & Analyze Patient Data
- Comprehensive Educational Information from Pre-Diagnosis to Severe Cases
- Seamless Automated Integration of Multiple Touch-Points to accommodate a full range of clients from those fully compliant to those for whom a Proactive Surveillance is Required
- More Focused & Relevant Information is Available to Care Givers
- Simultaneously able to Manage Multiple Disease States & Patients
- Greater Convenience & Less Time Commitments for Users Provides for Greater Recruitment & Retention
- Improved Treatment Compliance Monitoring & Patient Controlled Care
- Enhanced Integration & Coordination of Multi-Disciplinary Teams
- Seamless integration with existing software applications and databases
- Ability of Physician to Set/Post Individually Designed Selection of Dynamic Information for Patients for Automated Alerts & Notifications
REMEDY™ provides an end to the inefficient one-size-fits-all coverage. Instead, the flexibility of its design allows for personalized 1-to-1 outreach of healthcare promotion & management suited to the specific needs of each patient's condition.
Innovative Technology Procures Benefits
Today's technology has helped overcome some of the greatest challenges of earlier Health & Wellness and DM programs, most notably the difficulty in aggregating patient information. The technical simplicity afforded by the Internet both improves operational efficiency of these programs and provides individuals with more focused and relevant information for better self-management. The emergence of encryption technology has provided an unparalleled opportunity for improvements in privacy, confidentiality and information security.
Direct Connect Anytime & Anywhere Affords Improvements in Monitoring
REMEDY™' provides for an enhanced ability to make connections and alleviate the following issues present in today's healthcare delivery system:
- In the past it has been difficult to provide for patient self-monitoring: to collect and store information about their condition between their healthcare providers visits
- The communication between patient and caregiver today is:
- Time-Fragmented
- Initiated Mostly by the Patient
- Limited if Initiated by a Caregiver do to Patient Availability and Accessibility
- The communication between Healthcare Providers is Inefficient: e.g. Between Physicians - Pharmacy - Hospital
- Non-Compliance:
- Poor Medication Compliance
- Under-Estimation of the Severity of Their Condition
Practical Benefits to adopting a REMEDY™
Studies, have concluded that self-management education reduced hospitalizations, emergency department visits, unscheduled visits to the doctor, and days off work or school among adults with asthma and others found lower hospital in-patient and out-patient utilization among participants in a diabetes management program sponsored by a health maintenance organization.
- Increased Patient Compliance with Treatment Strategies:
- Ability to track dates of medication renewals
- Personal data highlighting improvement with treatment specifications
- Enhanced Patient-Caregiver Communication:
- Proactive and Preventive Model of Care
- Improved Access to Health Services & Education
- Powerful Self-Management Tool
- Improved Communication Among Healthcare Providers:
- More Accurate Patient Data Collection
- Convenient Online Access of Patient's Information to Members of a Patient's Circle-of-Care
- Easy, Timely Access to Relevant Health Information
- Latest product news for a particular condition
- Weather & Smog Alerts for Asthma Sufferers for example
- Contemporary Research Study Reports on Conditions
- Links to other sources of information
- Community Chat Room to Provide Patients with like conditions an opportunity to engage each other on how they are coping with their illness
- Frequently Asked Questions that provide patients a place to obtain information on commonly asked questions before contacting their healthcare provider
- A Survey system that allows physicians to gauge patients needs & requirements
Patient Empowering Care Reduces Costs
Using a cost-effectiveness analysis, studies indicated "direct savings to Medicaid of $3 to $4 for every incremental dollar spent providing asthma self-management support to physicians" caring for young, low-income patients.
Managing chronic conditions involves going beyond episodic, symptomatic care to monitoring patients over the long term, and providing continuous treatment that prevents worsening of their condition and maintains stable function. True patient-focused care must begin and, for as long as possible, remain outside of institutional settings. Assessing risk, planning prevention and coping with symptom fluctuation must happen at home, school, work and other non-clinical settings as any health system moves toward a population-health focus to reducing costs.
REMEDY™'s Patient controlled care is focused on:
- Patient empowerment through enhanced education resulting in treatment regimen compliance
- Predicting "lapse", preventing 'relapse' and insuring against "collapse"
- Involve the patient in his/her own management of their condition
Examples of Targeted Employee Groups that can benefit from a REMEDY™ system are:
- Health Monitoring for Executives
- Chronically Ill Patients
- Emergency Services (Fire & Police departments show excessive healthcare costs of its employees who succumb to disease while on the job.)
- Professional & Amateur Athletes
Using Technology to Solve the Problems Associated with Health, Wellness & Disease Self-Management Programs
The issue of health, wellness and disease management programs has been the sustainability of these programs both in terms of ongoing costs and the recruitment & retention of patients and physicians. Setting-up and maintaining programs in the past required additional labor resources such as clinicians to input and monitor patient data as well as to coordinate the activities of patients with other caregivers in their respective points in the circle-of-care. It also required more time by the sponsoring physicians to manage the ongoing program with their patient base. Inadequacies included the widespread failure to follow established practice guidelines because of the difficulty of monitoring. As a result, many managed care and integrated delivery systems have taken a great interest in correcting the many deficiencies in current management of diseases.
Healthcare Professional Issues:
- Rushed practitioners managing increased patient volumes
- Coordination & Communication between healthcare providers is poor (e.g. MD - Pharma - Hospital)
- Lack of active patient monitoring between physician visits to ensure the best outcomes
- Inefficient means to collect, enter, track & analyze data while maintaining care
- Inadequate and Poor Data quality
For patients, problems managing disease include:
- Inconvenience: Difficult for patients to collect & store data about their condition between visits
- Difficulty communicating with their caregiver. It tends to be time fragmented, initiated mostly by the patient and limited by the patient's accessibility
- Low motivation toward compliance with recommended medication regimen.
- Under-estimation of severity of condition due to lack of monitoring
REMEDY™ for Research: A Powerful, Low Cost Effective Tool
REMEDY™ provides an effective, low-cost and innovative means to enhance and run research projects. Some of its benefits are:
- More data points: The addition of a wireless capability enables subjects to monitor vital signs one or more times each day, for extended periods of time from anywhere at anytime. There is no other practical way to achieve this level of data density.
- Pharmacokinetic data: By monitoring vital signs at different times of the day, especially before and after drug doses, pharmacokinetics can be studied in a large population. For example, home blood pressure monitoring just before an antihypertensive dose is superior to both ambulatory and office monitoring in assessing trough-level drug efficacy.1,2
- More reliable data: Having patients enter data at the time an incident occurs reduces observer bias, errors in technique and recording errors. Upload of data that cannot be edited by the subject also eliminates the accidental and intentional errors in manual log books that have been widely documented.
- Increased power: Large numbers of readings from each subject diminishes the impact of within-subject variability, increasing statistical power.
- Symptom and side effects monitoring: The Interactive XML form question generator system can be used to query subjects about signs and symptoms of their disease, and of potential side effects of treatment. Assessing these signs and symptoms daily can reduce the number of office visits required to assess efficacy and safety. In the future the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system will enhance the monitoring capabilities.
- Better compliance with study regimen: Several studies have shown that home
- Monitoring increases medication compliance. The interaction capability can be used to query subjects about medication compliance each day. Although not always perfect, recall of medication consumption in the last few hours is considerably better than recall in the preceding weeks or months. Asking about medication compliance each time subjects send data also reinforces the importance of good compliance, and reminds them of the cause-and-effect relationship of medication usage and clinical results.
REMEDY™ tracks compliance daily, and have several features that promote self-monitoring. Each time a subject sends readings, the system can be set-up to send reminders for when the patient is to send the next set of readings. An automatic dial into the patient can be set-up to remind the subject to enter data. The dynamic architecture of the system allows personalized requirements to be set-up that will prompt REMEDY™ to automatically monitor data input errors and to report the status of data entry. Electronic alerts can be made to the subjects if they fail to send on schedule.
- More efficient data collection and analysis because subjects can access the system from anywhere at anytime there is less need for trial monitors to visit trial sites to transcribe data. Problems of data security and HIPAA compliance are greatly reduced, because less data are collected and stored at each trial site. All data are immediately stored in our 'anonymous' database, and complete interim data are available to study personnel as needed.
- Central data repository REMEDY™ maintains all monitoring data in a secure, fully HIPAA & PIPEDA -compliant SQL Server database. Data are backed up regularly on site, and weekly off site. In addition to reports to clinicians and study personnel, raw data as identified and tagged by the researcher are exported to SPSS, SAS and other statistical packages, and to all commonly-used relational databases.
- Convenience for subjects and clinicians Mobile & wireless interactive monitoring offers greater convenience for patients, clinicians and researchers, including fewer office visits and less data collection, download and management in the clinician's office.
- Cost reduction Low equipment costs, reduced need for site visits for data collection and review, and less nurse and physician time make automated home telemonitoring a cost-effective, patient- and clinician-friendly way to collect quality data in clinical trials.
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