At HIMSS19 in February, Oracle will introduce Connected Care, a telehealth and remote patient monitoring tool initially aimed at improving stroke outcomes.

“It has a lot of applicability in various use-cases,” said Michael Walker, global lead for healthcare and life sciences at Oracle. “We are using strokes as the example as it is a leading cause of death, and bad things happen when patients do not get the treatments they need within a given time window.”

Connected Care's remote patient monitoring leverages the internet of things, machine learning and the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse – a product debuted in October 2018 that makes it easier to deploy apps like Connected Care. Also under the hood of the data warehouse is Oracle Analytics.

“A scenario in a patient journey would be when they have a stroke in their home and then are being transported to a hospital when we connect them to a device and start streaming their data to the hospital, where they may or may not have a neurologist on staff,” Walker explained.

Rural area healthcare providers often do not have a range of  specialists on staff, for instance.

"So then it takes longer to get a patient to a hospital that has a neurologist on staff and you burn precious time a patient needs to get treatment faster,” he said. “And the local hospital loses that patient to another hospital.”

With Connected Care, the ambulance can stream the vital signs so that the provider at the local hospital can review them, and further, the technology can link to a remote neurologist. There might be a relationship between the local hospital and an academic medical center some distance away, and the neurologist is on standby and can make the diagnosis so that the local physician at the community hospital can perform the correct treatment.

“We also apply machine learning to the data to identify patterns,” Walker added. “Machine learning is looking at the data over time and if a pattern emerges, let’s say irregular heartbeat, then the physician is notified to take a closer look at the heart rhythm or an EKG within a specific period of time.”

The problem with any of these snapshots of data is they are very limited. Physicians are busy and cannot sit in front of a terminal and view data, so that is what machine learning is doing for the physician.

“We are working closely with the industry, we have physicians advising and people in the field running pilots and providing care,” Walker said. “There are a number of use-cases, stroke outcomes is one, pediatric cardiology is another example. Getting kids with heart defects home faster. Clinical trials is another example. We can reduce the drop-out rate of people in trials. The list goes on.”

The big change has been the shift by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reimburse for remote patient monitoring, he added.

“With telehealth, you really need that video feed,” Walker said. “CMS unbundled some CPT codes in 2018 and there will be more CPT codes in 2019 that will drive significant growth and opportunity in this space.”

Oracle will be in Booth 2305.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
 

Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.