by Tim Rowan, Editor
Under the dark cloud of a highly contagious virus, medical professionals are urgently getting people out of hospitals and nursing homes, environments where viruses are easily spread. Simultaneously, that same dark cloud has been frightening those newly discharged patients into locking their doors against home health nurses who have come to care for them, nurses who cannot always arrive equipped with protective masks, gloves, and gowns. many home health providers are seriously considering remote patient monitoring technologies.
RPM, or telehealth, is not a new technology, but Medicare's decision to reimburse only physicians and not home health providers who use it has kept it on wish list status. Lack of reimbursement did not stop Florida's Welcome Homecare, which calls itself Jacksonville's oldest and only 5-Star home healthcare agency. Today it serves five Florida counties out of its five office locations.
We spoke with Dwight Cenac about its telehealth program. He is Welcome Homecare's longtime Director of Marketing and newly installed VP of Operations. He is also the son of the agency's founder, also Dwight, a longtime home health activist and industry advocate.
Vivify is Welcome Homecare's third attempt to launch a remote patient monitoring program. With two previous launches canceled due to each product's Bluetooth connectivity problems, Cenac was understandably gun shy when he met Vivify at the Home Care Association of Florida annual meeting last year. "I had been a big proponent of telehealth but I had become discouraged," he told us, "So I told them, 'I do not want to talk to you unless you can show me something good.'"
One feature that grabbed his attention was Vivify's offer to package its tablet into a kit, with vital sign instruments customized to each patient. The kits are shipped directly to a patient's home and the instructions for setting it up -- essentially just plugging it in to an electrical outlet -- are printed in large lettering on the inside of the shipping box's cover. "Everything comes charged and ready to go," Cenac said, "and the Bluetooth connections have been set up and tested before shipping. They said they had an 85 percent success rate with elderly patients setting up the equipment by themselves. We are above 90 percent. Our nurses appreciate that they rarely have to get involved with setting up technology and showing patients how to use it."
He also appreciated Vivify's hundreds of built-in care pathways that can be assigned to each patient. "Pathways can be further customized by dragging and dropping additional components for each patient," Cenac continued.
Within the agency's average daily census of approximately 100 patients, 38 are currently on the telehealth program. One dedicated telehealth nurse manages the care of all 38 but could handle more, which is good, he told us, when remote care is becoming a necessity. "Because of COVID, we are seeing a significant uptick," Cenac said. "Patients want it. Our nurses are getting over the past bad experiences and beginning to trust it. We have started to refer to it as 'telecare' rather than 'telehealth.' And now we are able to reach out to hospitals, physician clinics, and residential facilities, offering to get their patients connected in 24 hours, to send someone if they need help, and to add their designated staff to the care team, with all the reports and patient status updates that our telehealth nurse receives."
With two-way communication as well as vital sign gathering, Cenac concluded, Welcome Homecare was ready for the COVID-19 pandemic, even though that was not the reason it signed on with Vivify. They can set up the system so patients can perform self-screening. They can monitor patients with COVID symptoms more closely. They can identify and monitor more close patients with underlying conditions that put them into a higher-risk COVID category. And they can keep patients informed of the latest CDC guidelines.
©2020 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Home Care Technology: The Rowan Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com