Patient Monitoring – The Health Care Blog

WTF Health | Self-Reported Patient Monitoring Startup from Finland, Kaiku Health

Jun 20, 2018

By JESSICA DAMASSA

WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health.

Central to the ‘WTF Health’ ethos is the idea that around the world, there is a shared passion for creating a new future for healthcare — and that the less-positive ‘WTF moment’ is a shared experience, regardless of which country’s health system one is standing in.

So, I’m going around the world this year — to 17 different health innovation conferences in 11 different countries — to find out what innovators abroad are doing to tackle the problems in their health systems and what we can learn from one another.

Driving down the cost of care, managing chronic conditions, helping people achieve better health, improving care delivery and patient experience — these goals know no borders. What’s different is the framework around them. So, what if the payment model were different? What if there was a single electronic patient record? What if certain laws and regulations didn’t exist?

Different constraints breed different solutions. What a hopeful and inspiring idea. And, with any luck, food for your thoughts and innovative thinking.

So here is the first interview I’d like to share from abroad! Everyone meet Finnish startup Kaiku Health, fresh off closing a €4.4M Euro series A. Their patient monitoring monitoring platform lets cancer patients (and others with chronic diseases) self-report on how they’re doing, using their hospital’s existing patient portal. Stick around until the end: Bonus insight on the strengths of the health tech startup scene in the Nordics for those who want to go explore.

Filmed at Upgraded Life Festival in Helsinki, early June.

Pharos Innovations Meets Isaac Asimov

Jun 5, 2014• 16

By AL LEWIS and VIK KHANNA

Isaac Asimov once remarked that a sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic.

Were he alive today, Mr. Asimov might also remark that both advanced technology and magic got nothing on Pharos Innovations, whose website reports a world-record 79% reduction in admissions for congestive heart failure (CHF) patient monitoring.

Pharos achieved this Nobel Prize-worthy result in CHF monitoring without actually using CHF monitoring devices, but rather just the telephone and that favorite tool of the frail elderly, the Internet. Most magical was the time this admission reduction took: 31 days.

On the graph below, you can see that the baseline ended December 31, 2007, while the full impact started February 1, 2008.

That means Pharos was magically able to find all these members’ contact information, write to them to announce the program, schedule the phone calls to the members to convince them to join the program, collect their information, conduct those phone calls, explain the system to the members, get them set up on the system, collect the information, get members to visit their doctors, and adjust lifestyles and medications…all during January.

Thanks to that lightning speed, there was literally a 90% decline between the December admissions rate and the February admissions rate, as this chart demonstrates. Overall, this chart is a dramatic rebuttal to the conventional wisdom, which would state that:

it takes a long time to make even the most minor improvements in a population through telephonic and Internet disease management, if indeed improvements are possible at all; and
a trendline that is “unchanged” does not decline 25% like Pharos “unchanged” matched cohort trendline above.

In college Al was assigned a roommate who was like the bad seed from the Richie Rich comics, a kid who, among other things, would have a snifter of cognac before bed. Once Al told this guy he was decadent. “Decadent, Al?” he countered. “Let me tell you about decadent. I spent last summer at a summer camp –everyone was there, Caroline Kennedy, everyone – where we played tennis on the Riviera and then went skiing in the Alps.”

Al agreed he had a point. “Wow, Lance, you’re right. That was decadent.”

“Al,” he replied, “I haven’t even gotten to the decadent part yet.”