Bosch Healthcare Enters into Telehealth Initiative with CMO
February 25, 2010
Palo Alto, CA-based Robert Bosch Healthcare, Inc. has joined forces with the Care Management Company (CMO) LLC, to introduce the Bosch Health Buddy® System at Montefiore Medical Center as a part of a telehealth project that will help monitor nearly 6,600 elderly and chronic care Medicare beneficiaries of Bronx. The initiative is supported by grants from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under its Care Management for High-Cost Beneficiaries Demonstration (CMHCB), which is aimed at assessing various methods for enhancing care for patients who depend on extensive social and medical services.
CMO, a part of the integrated delivery system, Montefiore Medical Center, provides various care management, and managed care services and programs to more than 100,000 patients. The Medical Center in turn caters to 2 million residents within the borough, as well as close by Westchester Counties, other parts of the nation, and across the globe. It delivers care through four acute care hospitals, above 20 ambulatory care settings, home health agency, and rehabilitation center.
The current roll-out of the program at the Medical Center has been undertaken following the success of the initial installations at Bend, OR and Wenatchee, WA. Following the deployment of the program at rural settings, Derek Newell, the vice president of Bosch Healthcare’s North American office, explains that the initial Health Buddy System roll-outs have demonstrated the success of telehealth models in rural environments, and that with its implementation in Montefiore, the concept will now be tested in one of the nation’s most diverse urban settings.
Forming an interface between the home-based patient and their healthcare provider, Bosch’s Health Buddy system will enable participants of the telehealth program to communicate historical patient information to their nurses and care managers on a daily basis, and reinforce positive behavior. Data collected about the patient’s health from the Health Buddy Appliance will be transferred to a Bosch data center for processing via Ethernet or a telephone line, which is then made available to the Medical Center’s care managers through the Health Buddy Desktop. The care managers risk-stratify the information to identify the beneficiaries requiring treatment intervention before their condition becomes critical. The system features health management programs for above 30 medical conditions, and supports secure clinical information databases, Internet-enabled decision support and customized content development tools.
By facilitating remote monitoring of the elderly and chronic patients, telemonitoring devices like this have the potential to lower the need for hospitalization, which further offers the prospective reduction in healthcare resource utilization and related costs. A 2005 randomized controlled study carried out by the Tufts-New England Medical Center, found that the Health Buddy System was capable of lowering re-hospitalization for heart failure by 72% and all cardiac-related hospital visits by 63%.
Professing that the telehealth device has repeatedly demonstrated decreased hospitalization requirement unless absolutely necessary, and better connectivity between the patients and their caregivers, Derek Newell anticipates continued results with the Health Buddy System through the January 2009-announced 3-year expansion of CMS’s CMHCB demonstration to 2012. Also, advocating lowered costs in healthcare spending through the telehealth program was CMO’s Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Rosenthal, who believes that with the Health Buddy program supporting the CMO’s care management skills, Montefiore hospitals will be able to deliver enhanced quality of life and health for their elderly and chronic care patients.
Health Buddy was included into the Bosch Group’s (parent company of Robert Bosch GmbH) healthcare product portfolio following the 2007 acquisition of California-based Health Hero Network, which focuses on the remote healthcare industry. CMO, the current Health Buddy client had previously contracted with Health Hero Network, in 2008, for its disease and care management programs, including the Montefiore Care Guidance Demonstration Project for New York.
Protected by 57 US patents, the home health monitoring technology has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As an open system, Health Buddy is designed to be interoperable with many current systems, applications, devices, etc., deployed at healthcare organizations.
Collaborating with various software Solution Partners, like application developers, content developers, and medical device manufacturers, Bosch aims to create new applications or transform the existing hardware and content solutions to be used along with its Health Buddy system. In September 2009, the company was honored with the 2009 Frost & Sullivan Market Strategy Leadership Award for the remote monitoring system, based on significant market presence achieved in the North American market. Bosch has strong brand recognition in the market by associating with corporate partners and large public groups, as part of the company’s marketing strategy.
In order to compliment its emerging position in the North American telehealth market, and fortify its presence in other dynamic areas, globally, Bosch entered into an agreement to acquire the Virginia-based remote healthcare management technology vendor, Visual Telecommunication Network Inc. (ViTel Net), in 2009.
With both CMO and Bosch encouraging the remote care delivery model, it is left to see how the current CMO-Bosch alliance will augment care of the elderly and chronically ill patients, and also influence the management of medical spending and care outcome.
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