Remote monitoring technology companies and medical data analytics firms are partnering to improve chronic care management. We’ve written about collaborations for wearable data clinical trials, regional telemedicine, precision medicine endeavors, and much more. In 2018 we covered Biofourmis and Vital Connect‘s collaboration focused on reducing hospital readmission rates for post-surgery cardiac patients. We also wrote about Biofourmis’ BeatHF acute cardiac care solution.
Biofourmis is back in the news, this time for a new collaboration with ImagineMIC that produces chronic care medical devices. The two companies’ partnership focuses on improving chronic care patient outcomes while lowering the associated healthcare costs. The first effort by the two companies centers on monitoring cardiac patients for arrhythmias and other conditions that call for medical intervention. Biofourmis ‘ RhythmAnalytics is an FDA-cleared artificial intelligence platform that detects dozens of arrhythmias, using enhancing deep learning. ImagineMIC will integrate RhythmAnalytics in its New York-based Monitoring Intervention Center (MIC).
Emergency physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and registered nurses trained in the MIC will use RhythmAnalytics for clinical decision support as they monitor patients in skilled nursing facilities and subacute care programs. Arrhythmia monitoring is the first step for the collaboration; both companies believe that they can scale up to include monitoring patients with a variety of chronic conditions.
Biofourmis trained the RhythmAnalytics engine with more than 4 million ECG recordings from a variety of FDA-cleared ECG wearables. ImagineMIC streams real-time data from a wearable sensor with a two-lead ECG and will provide 24-hour monitoring for more than 20 types of arrhythmias and other cardiac information via RhythmAnalytics. The goal is to significantly improve current ECG analysis accuracy. This could reduce interventions that can be unnecessary as much as 50% of the time, according to ImagineMIC. As the initial implementation shows success, the two companies intend to broaden the number of monitored conditions.
The Biofourmis and ImagineMIC collaboration demonstrates the potential benefit for all when companies combine their separately-developed technologies. Technology applications like this one have the potential to reduce the workload for healthcare professionals while improving outcomes and lowering healthcare costs.
