“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That’s the idea behind Medicare’s reimbursement for chronic care management (CCM), including non face-to-face services. The concept is that improved patient adherence to treatment instructions and monitoring of patient health can avoid complications that require more expensive intervention such as hospitalization. Oculus Health has launched a consumer-facing platform that provides personalized care management service along with other features that meet the Medicare billing requirements.
The company provides this as a service for healthcare providers, delivering an outsourced solution for tracking patients with chronic conditions. The system includes a secure and HIPAA-compliant electronic medical records system that allows information to be shared between the patient and healthcare professionals in order to coordinate treatment. Each patient gets an individual care plan that can be updated based on patient progress toward their goals. The system is available 24/7 with patient access to support services, and automatically generates the monthly reports required by Medicare for reimbursement. It also streamlines communications with the patient through a smartphone app, providing feedback and rewards, as well as providing reminders and making it easy to schedule appointments.
One of the most interesting features of the system is that it is designed to accept data from fitness trackers and other wearable Health Tech devices. This can allow the system to automatically monitor patients’ vital signs remotely, which increases the quality of information about their health between clinical visits. A service like this can serve as the hub for all the activities related to a patient’s health, and is designed to take the data handling burden off the shoulders of the physicians and other healthcare providers so that they can spend more time on their patients.
