Like telemedicine, home hospitalization programs existed well before 2020, but these services were hardly front and center when it came to standard health care practices. The coronavirus pandemic spotlighted telehealth out of necessity while bringing remote patient monitoring (RPM) and hospital-at-home services into the foreground. Home hospitalization reduces the chance of contracting COVID-19 for both patients and healthcare workers. It can also minimize the risk of life-threatening infections for immunocompromised individuals, such as oncology patients.
Current Health, an AI-enabled RPM platform, helps facilitate home hospital care for high-risk patients. The company recently announced a new partnership with the Mount Sinai Health System designed to help patients undergoing chemotherapy stay at home during recovery.
Cancer itself can weaken the immune system and chemotherapy also leaves the body vulnerable to dangerous blood infections that can lead to sepsis. A potentially fatal response to severe infection, sepsis can cause extreme organ damage, which can quickly lead to organ failure. Because sepsis occurs most often in hospital settings, staying home significantly decreases the risk of sepsis after receiving chemotherapy.
Under the new partnership, high-risk cancer patients receive Current Health’s wearable monitoring device to use at home. The device adheres to the upper arm where it measures body temperature, pulse and respiration rates, oxygen saturation, mobility, and step count. It continuously transmits its readings to the patient’s care team at Mount Sinai, who can view the data in real-time via the Current Health software platform.
The software uses AI algorithms to identify abnormalities; it sends alerts to the team when it detects signs of potential problems. The system includes integrated telehealth services, electronic prescriptions, and around-the-clock nursing support. A Current Health chatbot app lets patients record daily activities, answer targeted questionnaires, and communicate with their care team.
The Current Health platform isn’t limited to oncology patients. It offers disease-specific monitoring for more than 100 conditions and provides clinical insights designed to support nurses and physicians caring for patients outside of a hospital setting. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Current Health successfully partnered with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in the UK to monitor patients in residential care home facilities. Over the first three months of that partnership, remote monitoring lead to in-house interventions that kept 87% of residents out of the emergency room, potentially keeping an additional 144 hospital beds available, and decreasing the overall amount of care time required per patient.
