This article is sponsored by EarlySense. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with EarlySense CEO Matt Johnson to learn about the future of remote patient management and the impact this technology has made on health outcomes across the continuum. He also explains how the EarlySense technology is enabling home health providers to drive growth and tackle the crippling staffing challenges of 2021.
Matt, you’ve been in health care for over a decade, and you took over as CEO of EarlySense in 2019. What career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Matt Johnson: I’ve spent my entire career at the intersection of health and technology because I’m drawn to difficult, important problems that are worth solving. I think back on my time as CEO of CareCycle as the most relevant experience to my role at EarlySense today.
CareCycle had two main divisions. One of them was a large, home health care platform in Texas and Louisiana with about 30 locations and several thousand home health care patients; the other side of the house was a remote patient management platform called CareCycle Management. We created a call center of clinicians and technology to engage and manage high-risk, high-need patients on behalf of their health plans or care providers. The goal was to improve health outcomes and make life better for those chronically ill patients.
In fact, CareCycle would have been a great beneficiary of technology like EarlySense’s. EarlySense has contact-free, essentially invisible sensing technology that makes it so simple and easy to use that patient compliance is through the roof. I think while we were running CareCycle, we would have benefitted terrifically if we didn’t have to worry about patient compliance.
EarlySense was founded in 2004 and made a significant shift recently toward virtual care. What is the company’s mission, and what was the catalyst for that shift?
Johnson: We started almost 20 years ago with the idea of making extinct the unmonitored hospital bed. Roughly one third of beds in a typical hospital are ICU or telemetry beds, which are actively monitored. But the rest aren’t, so we developed this contact-free, invisible sensing technology to pull continuous data in the form of heart rate, respiratory rate and motion from the patients in those previously unmonitored beds. I think we fulfilled that vision earlier this year, and we’ve shifted our focus toward the home.
Limiting this technology to the hospital setting is too constrictive. We want to take care of patients where they are, providing interesting insight and relevant clinical data to caregivers who are providing that care to patients in any care setting. We see remote care and virtual care as the perfect confluence of the technological opportunity and also the clinical opportunity that we’re really looking to solve for.
This week is the first annual Telehealth Awareness Week, which is sponsored by the American Telehealth Association, and which EarlySense is co-sponsoring. Why is that important for the virtual care space at large?
Johnson: The American Telemedicine Society (now American Telemedicine Association or ATA) has been a part of the industry for some time. Everybody knows what remote patient monitoring is today, and the pandemic amplified the importance of what the ATA has done over the years. They have played a significant role in progressing the state of practice for telehealth, telemedicine and remote patient monitoring, so being able to support that is absolutely critical to us.
EarlySense believes in non-contact continuous monitoring. How specifically does that technology work, and why is it popular with home health patients, providers, and payers?
Johnson: EarlySense’s core offering is a contactless, piezoelectric sensor. It’s a sensor that you place under the mattress so that anytime someone’s in bed, it’s collecting vital signs, motion and other data, like sleep, from the individual. This translates into heart rate, respiratory rate, their variability and other things, which are continuously fed into the AI (artificial intelligence) and rules-based algorithms for processing.
The caregiver can then identify subtle changes that indicate a health condition change, whether that’s the onset of a disease, change in disease state or anything else. It drives a more proactive approach to care, and that is at the core of what we do.
Because the sensor is passive, it requires no interaction with the patient. Therefore we’re generating data every time a person’s in the bed, which is every night — or possibly even a third of the day. We would describe that as a really high compliance level. Other solutions might require a scale, blood pressure cuff or an online form to capture health information. While those still have favorable effects, they have lower compliance.
Patients appreciate this because it requires nothing from them, and providers like it because if they can get data every day about a patient, that data can accumulate into significant predictions of that person’s health outcomes. Lastly, payers like it because the provider’s interventions can bend the cost curve and take care of patients in the setting that they most prefer — their home, which is also the least expensive setting. Through this process, we’re preventing a whole lot of hospitalizations.
In order for a home health agency to create lasting success in the telehealth space, what do you think is the lynchpin to that success?
Johnson: Home health has the advantage of being the leaders in remote care and virtual care, because they have the last mile to the patient’s home. The principal challenge home health faces is that their engagements are episodic, which requires much more precision to be successful.
Instead, I would encourage providers to think about remote patient management from an additive perspective. Many times it can be separate from a primary home-health episode, and that requires a whole lot of creativity. It relies on relationships with the payer community and relationships with other risk-bearing entities to be the leaders in engaging people in their homes.
The fact of the matter is, the payer community – the risk-bearing community – is heavily interested in figuring out how to engage and manage high-risk, high-need patients in their homes. Home-health agencies are the best equipped to help solve that problem.
Staffing was a major problem in home health even before the pandemic, and it’s only gotten more challenging. How does EarlySense technology address the industry’s staffing shortage, and what’s up next for EarlySense?
Johnson: The early beginnings of data-driven home health technology used rules-based algorithms driving most of the innovation. It’s really comfortable and familiar for home-health providers because it’s similar to the general course of care. But machine learning provides significant change, and EarlySense plays into that with continuous, contact-free data. Continuous modalities are new in the home, and when we think about the accumulation of eight or more hours of continuous data, we can create a much richer prediction of patient deterioration.
All of this adds up to home visits that are more timely, more appropriate and deliver higher value. In the long term, it looks like home health care — where the preponderance of engagement is via data — and the in-person interactions are where in-person visits are critical and necessary. The continuous, longitudinal or in-between questions can be handled by a virtual nurse or virtual therapist, and that’s only made possible with these advanced technologies.
We are super excited about EarlySense technology making its way into the home, because chronic illness is a problem worth solving. It’s going to require all of us working together toward the same goals and the same objectives, which is to reduce the negative impacts of chronic care. Chronic care becomes cumbersome and expensive when it becomes acute, so by deploying these novel sensors into the home, we can accumulate enough data on a patient to facilitate more timely, appropriate and predictive provider interactions.
In addition to deploying these technologies into the home, we’re excited about what we’re doing on the data science side of the house. This continuous data creates machine learning opportunities where we can go well beyond rules-based algorithms, which is of course where we started. The predictive nature of this data accumulates and becomes even more valuable over time, and we’re dedicating a lot of resources to building that out.
Entering this year, no one knew fully what to expect. What has been the biggest surprise to you in the home-based care industry, and what impact do you think it will have on the industry for the remainder of the year?
Johnson: When people started to engage with services like telehealth and remote patient management, the permanence of these things was impacted by COVID and other factors. Today, there has been a rise in consumerism around these technologies. When we used to talk about consumerism and health care, we were talking about price transparency. Now, we are talking about consumer expectations that drive simple and easy-to-use products that are wildly different from what we’ve done in health care in the past.
The way we view the world is now in sync with the way we create these products, and we have to create solutions that are so simple, straightforward and easy to use. We’re occasionally a patient, but we’re always a person, and as a person who is interested in their health, we have certain expectations. I think the industry is generally going to have to rise to that new level of expectation.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EarlySense® is the global leader in 100-percent contact-free, continuous monitoring solutions. Used worldwide in hospitals, post-acute care facilities and throughout the care continuum, EarlySense patented technology delivers reliable and comprehensive multi-vital, motion and sleep data. The company’s technology and predictive data science applications empower providers, clinicians and patients with continuous multi-vital data and actionable insights that improve quality of life and patient outcomes, across the care continuum. To learn more, visit earlysense.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact sales@agingmedia.com.
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