Outsourcing-Pharma recently spoke with Stewart Whiting, today’s chief technical officer for Health, about how the practice of home health screening has evolved in the month leading up to the pandemic, the new Community with Conventional Health offer, and what the landscape would look like in the years to come.
OSP: Could you share a current Health perspective on business acceptance and using a home health check?
SW: Home study has been around for over a decade, but only recently have we begun to see models of care delivery fundamentally due to this technology. This is largely because new screening solutions can bring far more sophisticated visibility into patients ’health. Coupled with advances in data science, remote monitoring platforms can provide organizations with visual insights that allow them to transfer intensive patient care from hospital to home.
COVID-19 has made this need even more apparent as it has demonstrated the clinical and functional benefits of meaningful care and RPM. As the disease spread around the world, that included digital health devices to monitor patients at home, preventing the spread of disease and reducing the pressure on hospital facilities. At the same time, patients with the highest risk, such as those with heart failure or moderate symptoms of COVID-19, were able to avoid the potentially dangerous hospital environment and still have access to the care required. they must, safely.
How the delivery of healthcare moves from hospital to home – driven in part by policies such as the Medicare and Medicaid Services Center for Home (CMS) program and the permanent expansion of system-wide telehealth programs – demand for technology solutions that help monitor and manage patients with increased hospital-level vision from patients ’home. For example, in 2020 Conventional Health saw a 400% expansion in their hospital customer base and grew from monitoring just a few hundred patients to tens of thousands.
As adoption grows, new use cases for using ongoing clinical data to identify and predict illness and ultimately enable earlier immunosuppressive treatment will emerge. For example, Health is currently working with Mount Sinai to monitor newly diagnosed oncology patients and they usually need more guidance to get into hospital and improve patient outcomes.
We have also seen a sharp increase in decentralized clinical trials that use remote monitoring to capture patients ’energy within the home, rather than requiring patients to access a research facility . Although the initial demand for decentralized testing stemmed from the need to continue research through the early days of the pandemic, all our customers intend to expand these efforts. going forward because it is far more patient and offers a wealth of new data to support R&D Efforts.
OSP: Could you tell us how the idea for Community came about?
SW: We created a Community with Health right now because we believe that only through a deep understanding of how people develop illness can we develop therapies to help patients avoid hospitalization altogether. Community is the next natural step in generating the world’s largest database of long-term out-of-hospital health perspectives to drive biomarker prediction and development algorithms.
With Community, we can bring a new lens to people’s daily lives and how their actions affect their health. The community allows people to participate in clinical research from home, unlike traditional clinical trials that are limited to employment areas around academic research centers. This means we can develop more representative datasets, including numbers that were generally excluded from clinical study.
Through ongoing data analysis, Cymuned allows us to collect data that allows us to understand natural changes in a person’s biology, offering insight into patients’ health 24/7 and not just when they visit the hospital. or when asked to report vital signs.
By monitoring these natural changes, it can reveal underlying conditions that may have been discovered and may have influenced patient and examination outcomes. Community also helps researchers gain a better understanding of disease progression and decline to inform drug development and further studies.
OSP: Could you share a little more detail on how technology at work can help identify issues and predict illness or problems?
SW: With routine Health follow-up monitoring, we are able to capture hospital-level views without participants ever leaving their homes. Continuously capturing data through our FDA-purified consumption sensor allows us to gain broader insights into people’s health than ever before.
By collecting and creating the largest set of real-time and real-time patient data, researchers, engineers and scientists can analyze this data to understand disease progression and develop an AI algorithm. develop and train to help predict disease decline. In addition, these biomarkers can help researchers in the development of drugs that provide earlier preventive treatment to the global population.
OSP: Please tell us a little more about your COVID-19 screening:
SW: Our goal for the COVID-19 study is to gather as much critical patient information, symptoms, and behaviors as possible to develop and train an algorithm that predicts when COVID-19 infection is likely to grow enough to require hospitalization. By predicting hospitalization as a result of COVID-19, we hope to enable earlier intervention, improve patient outcomes and help hospitals increase their limited resources – all of which are essential to mitigate the impact of disease. reduction and clinical treatment for developing COVID-19 patients.
Outside of the direct impact for COVID-19 treatment, the data will ultimately contribute to data models that allow us to predict health predictions for a broader set of diseases such as COPD and CHF.
Anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 48 hours, resides in the U.S. and is older than 21 years can participate in the study. Participants in their homes will be monitored continuously for 30 days with the Current Health accessibility sensor and will be required to perform daily monitoring through the schedule provided by Current Health.
The survey questions will ask participants about their symptoms and any visits to doctors or hospitals they may have. These collected health data will help researchers develop models to predict outcomes and decline for COVID-19 and further scientific study around the disease.
This is the first study conducted by the new Community Initiative at Conventional Health and is part of our collaboration with the U.S. Department of Advanced Biomedical Research Development Association (HHS) (BARDA).
OSP: How do you locate and reach out to eligible patients?
SW: We specifically use social media to reach people across the U.S. who have recently been tested with COVID-19. Participants can express an interest through the standard Community with Health website where they will then complete an online questionnaire and receive a screening call from a member of the study team to determine their eligibility. .
OSP: Could you tell us about the scope (ie how many patients, and where) of the study?
SW: We are aiming for 2,000 people across the US to participate in a 30-day home clinical trial. Participants will be monitored 24 hours a day during the 30 day period.
OSP: Is there anything you would like to add about the COVID-19 study, or the Community initiative?
SW: Like all data science, your ideas are only as good as what you submitted. The community allows us to create a more representative data set that we can use to develop earlier immune therapies. However, it does mean that we need to make the technology accessible to all patients.
Conventional Health provides a turnkey solution for clinical trial participants, so it is easy to access and simple to use. Everything a survey partner needs is sent directly to their homes, including a tablet and internet connection for those who don’t have access to a smartphone or broadband.
By providing the technology and connectivity needed, we can help overcome some of the barriers that have previously encouraged low communication, such as not being able to access on Wi-Fi, computer or mobile device. By reducing the barriers, we can extend our reach beyond what is around the hospital or academic center to reach a more diverse population of participants and create a more representative clinical dataset .