Intermountain Health has expanded its agreement and partnership with CareCentra, Inc., to include remote monitoring of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and adult asthma to better detect symptom exacerbation and intervene earlier.
CareCentra’s prevention-as-a-service platform will now be used to monitor distal signs of risk using a framework of data points and biometrics from digital devices and patient reported information in combination with their unique proprietary algorithms.
CareCentra’s AI will respond to early risk signals by coaching patients on proper inhalation technique for optimal medication delivery, alerting patients to environmental risks, helping remove barriers for medication adherence, and prompting a range of lifestyle behaviors that can improve outcomes.
When the AI senses that risk of exacerbation is too high to be managed by the AI or through behavioral changes, it sends an alert to the Pulmonary Disease Navigator team, registered respiratory therapists, for care coordination with the patient’s primary care provider and intervention – keeping the care team connected 24/7.
Intermountain Health is a leader in healthcare innovation and was recently awarded the 2023 HIMSS Davies Award for their Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), using Pulmonary Disease Navigators (PDNs) to reduce 30-day COPD readmission by 11.2%.
The CareCentra platform allows Intermountain Health to start scaling this initiative to the approximately 300,000 patients with COPD and adult asthma, who have received care at Intermountain Health’s 33 hospitals and 385 clinics.
Vasant Kumar, CEO of CareCentra said, “By leveraging digital health approaches that use behavior science in combination with AI/Machine Learning (ML) models, we not only sense distal risk, but we also help shape patient behaviors to manage that risk at home.”
“CareCentra’s AI allows us to replicate the day-to-day monitoring and coaching of our Pulmonary Disease Navigators, while digitally monitoring risk levels and alerting PDNs to intervene with only the most critical patients,” said Kim Bennion, director of respiratory care research at Intermountain Health. “The human element of care can never be replaced, but we can make it even more efficient by bringing care directly to the patient when they need it most.”
The CareCentra platform provides a near real-time remote patient monitoring system that captures data from multiple sources, as well as a range of devices, with data points, including expiratory flow rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, heart rate, inspiratory flow rates, date/time stamps of medication delivery, and more.
“We’re creating an early warning system -a sort of ‘check engine’ light – to keep patients out of the hospital,” said Kumar.
Intermountain Health and CareCentra have been innovating together for nearly a decade. Intermountain has used the CareCentra platform in efforts to reduce hospitalization and healthcare costs in cardiovascular disease, heart failure, diabetes, maternal fetal medicine, and now respiratory care.
“Our chronic lung patients deserve to be given every advantage that connected care has to offer. Through technology, we believe we can provide even better access to high-touch, personalized care in the most convenient and accessible way for our patients.”
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