Dive Brief:
- GE Healthcare is partnering with AMC Health to extend its patient monitoring capabilities into the home.
- The collaboration brings together GE’s acute monitoring capabilities for patients in hospital and AMC’s 510(k)-cleared remote patient monitoring platform to support home care.
- GE sees its partner’s capabilities as complementary to its existing hospital-based virtual care environments, such as Command Center and MURAL Virtual ICU.
Dive Insight:
New York-based AMC has worked for the past two decades to enable care teams to remotely monitor patients. The work has led to an Food and Drug Administration-cleared platform that integrates with wireless devices to enable monitoring chronic and acute conditions including heart failure and diabetes. AMC pitches its platform as a way to reduce hospital readmission rates and otherwise improve health outcomes.
GE has identified the platform and its associated technologies as a good fit for its own plans. Ashutosh Banerjee, general manager for diagnostic cardiology and remote patient monitoring at GE, said in a statement the company partnered with AMC because of its “established and proven success engaging with patients to measure numerous biometrics in the home to extend the continuum of care.”
The collaboration will see GE pair its clinical monitoring offering with AMC’s remote monitoring platform to extend care beyond the clinical setting, letting more patients receive quality care at home. The goal is to improve the care non-acute patients receive after leaving hospital.
“Exploding healthcare costs, a rising aging baby boomer population, the increased prevalence of chronic disease, and continuous healthcare professional labor shortages” are driving investment in remote patient monitoring, Gregg Malkary of Spyglass Consulting Group wrote in a report on remote monitoring published shortly before the pandemic began.
More than 133 million Americans, or about 45% of the U.S. population, have at least one chronic disease, and chronic diseases are responsible for seven out of every 10 deaths in the U.S., killing more than 1.7 million Americans every year. That makes monitored home care “an imperative” for providers, Malkary wrote.
GE will work with AMC to develop a scalable remote patient monitoring system that uses analytics and risk stratification to identify anticipated patient demand for future services, including hospital admission and readmission. The partners also plan to integrate hospital and home data into GE’s Edison Health database to provide clinicians with more information to inform their decisions.
