The HIMSS19 exhibit hall this week features health IT vendors offering a wide-ranging selection of technologies and tools designed to help healthcare organization improve care, gain efficiencies and lower costs. Here is another round-up of new products from vendors on the show floor.

IoT wearables platform

VivaLNK, a connected healthcare technology vendor, has introduced its Internet of Things-enabled medical wearable Sensor Platform, which comes with a range of sensors, edge computing technologies and an “Internet of Health Things” data cloud.

This platform captures human vitals and biometrics, and delivers data from the patient to edge computing devices, as well as to the cloud, for application integration and analysis.

Available through the VivaLNK Developer Program, the Sensor Platform enables IoT technology partners to capture streams of patient data such as heart and respiratory rates, temperature, ECG rhythms, activity and more. Partners such as Vitalic Medical, a digital health vendor specializing in the early detection of patient health deterioration and potential falls, is developing a bedside monitoring system using the platform.

“Our growing aging patient population, rising complex health conditions and increasing staff workloads make it challenging for medical professionals to detect early signs of patient deterioration and prevent falls,” said Sue Dafnias, CEO of Vitalic Medical. “By leveraging VivaLNK wearable sensor within the Vitalic platform, Vitalic Medical can offer an early trigger system that helps nurses identify early signs of patient deterioration and fall-risk patients.”

The IoT in healthcare has the potential to significantly change healthcare for the better, and the key starts with data, VivaLNK said. Much of the machine learning and intelligence will come from user-generated data that currently doesn’t exist or is not easily accessible. This is where wearable devices collecting medical-grade data that can easily connect to networked applications becomes crucial, the company added.

“The launch of our Sensor Platform is instrumental in helping solution partners accelerate medical and healthcare innovation to market, especially within crucial therapeutic areas such as cardiology, cancer, chronic disease and more,” said Jiang Li, CEO of VivaLNK. “To have a more complete picture of patient health, applications and algorithms not only need access to data, but need a variety of relevant data that can be used to correlate and accurately assess and predict health situations.”

VivaLNK is at HIMSS19 in booth 8158.

Patient engagement platform

TriFin Labs debuted its Enlyt Health patient engagement platform at HIMSS19. Enlyt Health streamlines patient engagement and speed-to-market, ultimately saving health systems time and money while providing significant value to patients, providers and employees, TriFin contended.

Enlyt Health is a platform that can be used to create a single customized and HIPAA-compliant innovation platform that integrates seamlessly into existing electronic health records and CRM systems while allowing for a comprehensive view of every patient, TriFin said. The platform offers a variety of features that can be tailored to meet each hospital system’s needs, providing patients with access to health records, medications, referrals and lab information, and enabling them to find physicians within the hospital network, TriFin said.

In addition, Enlyt Health can coordinate in-app rideshare integration, uses iBeacons, Apple’s technology standard using Bluetooth Low Energy, to guide patients from their homes to their appointments, and has a pharmacy feature that enables patients and pharmacists alike to review past and present treatments, prescriptions and data.

The Enlyt Health platform combines Salesforce and a series of modules and features to decrease health systems’ costs and increase production speed, TriFin said. Enlyt’s Salesforce CRM integration allows for in-app messaging, case workflows and more.

TriFin is at HIMSS19 in the Salesforce booth, No. 3311.

RCM, credentialing, enrolling

Elsewhere on the show floor, eMDs unveiled Aria Health Services. The expanded offering, which comes on the heels of eMDs’ recent acquisition of Aprima, provides healthcare organizations of all sizes with access to a deep pool of resources to support their revenue cycle management, credentialing and enrollment operations.

Aria is designed to enable healthcare organizations to reduce the administrative burden, complexity and disruption that these normally time-intensive and detail-oriented tasks require, allowing organizations to focus instead on patient care and outcomes.

Aria Health Services will provide users with the scale and extensive expertise that come from combining the best of eMDs’ and Aprima’s service lines, eMDs said. Aria Health Services offers practices technology flexibility, it added. Healthcare organizations can use eMDs’ proprietary technology, or the services can be seamlessly integrated with other electronic health record and practice management systems.

The Aria Health Services line includes Aria RCM, which leverages existing technology, ensuring cleaner claims and faster collections through streamlined and highly automated workflows, while offering practices control over their data with complete transparency into the process, eMDs said.

It also includes Aria Credential, which is a credentials verification service with an expert team providing Primary Source Verification of qualified healthcare providers for participation in various organizations to make sure that credentialing is completed accurately to minimize coverage and legal exposure issues, eMDs said.

And the Aria offering includes Aria Enroll, which works with nearly any payer, including Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurers, to organize and prepare the detailed information needed to maintain enrollment with health plans at a fraction of the time and cost of doing so in-house, eMDs contended.

eMDs is at HIMSS19 in booth MP187.

Decision support with genomics and deep learning

Health IT giant Royal Philips has launched IntelliSpace Epidemiology, a system that optimizes the detection of healthcare associated infections in the hospital. It is a decision support technology that combines clinical informatics and genomic sequencing information from pathogenic bacteria, aiming to efficiently assist infection control prevention teams in identifying infection transmissions.

Healthcare associated infections are a critical threat to patient safety and health system costs, resulting in higher mortality rates each year than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined, Philips said. Approximately 2 million people get an infection during a hospital stay each year, costing the U.S. healthcare system about $35 billion, Philips added.

Hospitals without automated technologies and a central repository of infection information can have a difficult time detecting infections in a timely manner, causing them to progress and spread, Philips contended. IntelliSpace Epidemiology combines the areas that drive infection – such as patients, clinicians, locations or equipment – with clinical informatics and bacteria genomic information.

The system can display pertinent information in dashboards that fit into a clinician’s workflow to enhance clinical action. This helps infection control prevention teams identify early outbreaks in the hospital so they can intervene and help to stop the spread, aiming to deliver improved patient and staff experiences, better health outcomes and lower costs of care, Philips said.

Philips Epidemiology is a single, integrated system that combines clinical informatics, bio-informatics and genome sequencing information. Hosted on Philips HealthSuite, IntelliSpace Epidemiology leverages deep learning and clinical analytics to genetically fingerprint pathogens and track infection transmissions quickly, as well as where they originated in the hospital.

Philips is at HIMSS19 in booth 2101.

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