Innovations: Connecting to patients with mobile tech

The ability of doctors and nurses to monitor patients in their homes will be a key tool to make sure early warning signs don't become serious conditions.

Plano, Texas-based Vivify Health is one of the earliest and largest players in this space. Its digital health tools have been used for a number of conditions, from monitoring infants with congenital heart defects to managing older patients with diabetes.

The platform, Vivify Pathway, is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly even for people who aren't tech-savvy; the average age of its users is 76. Vivify offers the entire health kit on its own tablets, but has recently expanded to let patients “bring your own device,” a more cost-effective and convenient way for people to interact with its software.

“The most unique component is our ability to engage patients of any age or technical ability,” said Eric Rock, Vivify's founder and CEO. “We've refined the solution so it works even in rural areas where there's less connectivity.”

Vivify offers different tools depending on the patient's needs. For patients at the highest risk, Vivify provides a 4G tablet that can be connected to any number of wireless health devices, such as scales or blood pressure monitors. The software, which is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, allows clinicians to monitor patient data and triage people who need early intervention. Patients also can use their devices for videoconferences with their care teams.

The tablets can be customized with care-management plans as well as educational content. Family members also can track their loved one's health information. The company says its utilization rate is above 90%.

For patients who are not yet high-risk, but are what Vivify refers to as “rising risk,” the company offers Vivify Go, its mobile app that performs many of the same functions as the tablet but can be accessed from a patient's own smartphone or tablet.

That technology also will be central to Vivify's push into the employer market and for customers who want to use the tools for population health and wellness programs. “Now we can cover the entire population with a mix of those technologies,” Rock said.

Evolution Health, a mobile healthcare provider and Vivify investor, runs the “medical command center” that monitors patients using Vivify's platform.

Providers can create care-management plans for their own patients. Once they do, those protocols are available to any other customer who wants to use them for a similar patient population.

“They are the experts in what they do best,” Rock said. “We're effectively crowdsourcing those algorithms.”

Alignment Healthcare, a health plan based in Orange, Calif., evaluated more than half a dozen remote monitoring vendors before choosing Vivify, which offered the most tools for monitoring patients. The insurer takes full or shared risk on Medicare beneficiaries in California, Florida and North Carolina.

Patients who are identified as high-risk during an office visit receive the Vivify tablet, which lets them track data from their remote monitoring devices and connect with a clinician at the touch of a button.

“You always want to know what changed for the patient,” said Dr. Arta Bakshandeh, Alignment's senior medical officer. “So asking these questions on a daily basis allows you to create a true baseline. It also gives a good avenue for a patient to feel comfortable that someone is monitoring them on a daily basis.”

Among patients who used the remote monitoring device, admissions declined 49% in 2015. The 30-day readmission rate dropped to zero among its North Carolina patients who received the device compared with 12% among patients who weren't monitored and the 18.1% Medicare average.

Vivify has about 75 insurers and health systems as customers, and the systems include more than 600 hospitals. It has raised $25 million to date from investors that includes Ascension Ventures, Laboratory Corporation of America and UPMC.

The company is Rock's third technology venture. His first company, ProHost, was designed to help restaurants track and manage available tables. He ultimately sold it to OpenTable, the web-based reservations platform.

His next venture was MedHost, a software company that offers tools for hospitals to track patient flow and introduced touch-screen technology for electronic health records and self-service patient kiosks.

Vivify is now rolling out a number of tools to support its move into a broader market for lower-risk patients. It will soon offer Vivify Active, a software program that runs on wearable devices, and is introducing a population health dashboard that will provide analytics of patient data.