Company Overview: Erah Cloud is an Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Businesses (EDWOSB) eligible business. We believe in accelerating the Federal agency’s mission, improving efficiency, and effectiveness — to help reimagine the Citizen Health experience through the use of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technologies.
Problem Statement: Roughly 50% of the global populace and more than 57 million people reside in 5,864 specific areas that are identified as primary care shortage zones in the United States. This demographic lacks the fundamental healthcare amenities.
In the conventional healthcare system, patients bear the responsibility of taking preventive measures and adopting healthy lifestyle habits. However, this approach can be arduous for low-income patients, particularly those with chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Due to their financial and health circumstances, prioritizing a healthy diet, exercise, regular monitoring of vitals, and preventive healthcare appointments can be considered unaffordable luxuries. The following are some of the challenges patients may confront:
- Juggling multiple hourly jobs may not permit time off for healthcare visits.
- Lack of access to transportation to reach healthcare facilities.
- Restrictions imposed by health insurance policies may limit their options to fewer providers who may not be conveniently accessible or available.
Patients who do not receive timely and adequate healthcare may suffer from preventable health complications. This can result in visits to Emergency Rooms (ERs) where medical staff may not have access to the patient’s medical history, making it difficult to determine the best course of treatment.
There needs to be a shift towards preventative, value-based care rather than focusing solely on episodic and symptom-based treatment. This approach can benefit providers like the Veterans Affairs (VA) by ensuring timely and equitable treatment for patients while helping payers like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to reduce their overall healthcare costs.
Solution: Remote patient monitoring (RPM) programs are instrumental in minimizing disruptions to patients’ daily lives while still providing quality healthcare. An article titled “RPM 101: What Is Remote Patient Monitoring, Its Benefits, and Uses?” explains the various advantages of using RPM programs to monitor patients. By using RPM, patients can receive continuous monitoring of their vital signs and other health indicators, even when they are not in the same location as their healthcare providers. Additionally, RPM can reduce the need for in-person visits and decrease healthcare costs, making it a valuable tool for both patients and providers.
RPM programs utilize home health monitoring devices, such as smart watches, blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, and body weight monitors, which are collectively referred to as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). By using IoMT devices, healthcare providers can monitor patients remotely and identify potential health issues early on, before they become serious problems. To further streamline the process, it is beneficial to automate the anomaly detection and alerting process, which would help to reduce the burden on healthcare providers and ensure timely interventions when necessary.
By integrating RPM with telehealth visits, patients can receive quality care and interventions from the comfort of their own homes, without the need for in-person visits. This approach not only reduces the burden on patients but also on healthcare providers, as they can attend to multiple patients remotely. Moreover, this approach also allows for better continuity of care, as healthcare providers can access patient data in real-time during telehealth visits, allowing them to make informed decisions about the patient’s care. Overall, integrating RPM with telehealth visits is a promising solution for delivering efficient and effective healthcare services.
To solve this problem, we recommend the Remote Patient Care Hub solution (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Remote Patient Care Hub
This platform can aggregate all available data about a patient and run analytic models to help guide healthcare decisions. First step, this solution collects data from several sources, including the electronic health record (EHR), smart devices, social determinants of health surveys, and claims history.
Collected data is later pushed into the HIPAA-eligible ‘Health Data Hub’ that hosts the data in an industry-standard HL7/FHIR-compliant data lake. It hosts structured and unstructured data while running AI/ML analysis to convert text to comprehend medical terms such as ICD codes or PHI data.
Medically comprehendible data is used in dashboards from real-time clinical data, and it’s further processed by a machine learning model to track patient anomalies, that can be used in web and mobile applications to track patient’s vitals and make real-time decisions by Physicians and take actions such as booking Telehealth with the patient in real-time.
Figure 2 Dashboard for Population Health
As shown in Figure 2, data hosted in Health Data Hub is further processed by researchers looking at the trends to define programs for underserved communities. It will help agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ) to define programs for underserved communities at scale.
Impact: This solution will help reduce healthcare costs substantially for Medicare and Medicaid by directly applying value-based healthcare at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) while allowing doctors to provide just-in-time care for our most vulnerable and underserved veteran population. This solution will also help agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ) to define programs for underserved communities at scale.