Sam Hernandez, Release Manager
With 2023 having come to a close, we take one more look at how health systems are leveraging digital care to streamline processes, improve patient engagement and utilizing RPM vendors to manage patient conditions. Here are a few client stories we saw put into place at the end of the year.
Featured Client Stories and Outcomes
1. Xealth Increases Engagement 2.5x via SMS
- Business Goal: Improve outcomes for side effect management with both email and SMS delivery of radiation patient education materials.
- Project: Earlier this year an Illinois health care system implemented digital delivery of patient education around managing radiation side effects that was previously printed handouts. Initially only email delivery was implemented, but later in the year SMS was added on to increase the number of patients engaging with the content.
- Results: The health care system has seen a significant increase in click rates and patient engagement with the education materials. Click rates increased from 25% to 60% with the introduction of SMS delivery. Patient engagement increased 2.5x with the introduction of SMS delivery.
2. Xealth and VeeOne Help Save $1400 Per Patient for CHF Patients
- Business Goal: Remotely manage CHF patients via the VeeOne platform
- Project: An Illinois health care system recently integrated with VeeOne through the Xealth platform in order to manage Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients via the VeeOne platform. The health system is targeting to lower hospital readmission & ED utilization by enabling patients to be able to manage their CHF condition on their own at home. The goal is to capture the daily weight for CHF patients, since weight is the best indicator of fluid volume which reflects cardiac output, and fluctuation beyond 2 lbs per day requires clinician intervention. Clinicians can order the VeeOne CHF program and Xealth automatically places a CHF Program Guide (pdf) in the patients MyChart/Patient Portal account to help them further to activate on the tool.
- Results: This program just went live, initial estimated savings are $1,400 per patient per year.
3. Providing Nutritional Support to Food-Insecure Families
- Business Goal: Provide eligible patients and their families access to registered dietitian and nutrition programs to help children’s physical and cognitive development
- Project: An upper midwestern health care system is utilizing the Foodsmart vendor through Xealth Digital Care to connect low income families with Foodsmart’s network of registered dietitians to provide nutritional guidance and customize meal programs. Malnutrition not only affects a child’s physical development, but also their cognitive development, and for families who struggle with access to food, finding the most nutritional options is often extremely hard. Foodsmart is a covered benefit for Chorus Community Health Plan (CCHP) patients, and provides access to a national network of registered dietitians who work with patients and their families to develop personalized nutrition programs. Clinicians are able to manually order and distribute the Foodsmart webpage alongside automated orders, which will replace their current ‘word of mouth’ distribution.
- Results: This use case was very recently implemented, however, the goal is to get to 50% engagement.
4. Educating Elite Athletes On Rights Before Surgery And Reducing Risk
- Business Goal: Reduce risk while educating elite athletes of their rights prior to orthopedic surgery
- Project: A large Pennsylvania-based health care system treats elite athletes regionally, nationally, and internationally. They are utilizing Xealth to digitally order education on patient rights prior to orthopedic surgery as well as a Legal Liability Agreement (LLA) document that patients sign before surgery.
- Results: The health care system has an annual goal of 100 patients/orders and as of January, they are seeing 78.6 % patients accessing the education content.
5. Drive Reimbursement for RPM Activities
- Business Goal: Support the entire RPM workflow – order, enrollment, monitoring, and billing
- Project: A large nonprofit health care system has partnered with the All.Health platform to deliver a preventative health platform for Remote Patient Monitoring for patients with at-risk chronic conditions. All.Health monitors patients virtually via a smart band, allowing the health system to manage the patient while they’re at home. As part of the workflow, Xealth embeds an All.Health monitoring dashboard directly into the clinical workflow and supports the customer to automate the billing requirements for RPM reimbursement.
- Results: A successful pilot launch, hitting the patient volume goals. Optimization to the workflow is underway to further support expansion across the ecosystem.
2024 promises to be an exciting year with many more diverse projects in the works and more Xealth features to help health care systems meet their goals with digital care. Stay tuned for more stories and possibly some ideas to implement today!
Partners/Integrations
A study published in Medical Economics surveyed 141 health care executives and clinicians and found that interest and spending on remote patient monitoring (RPM) will continue into the new year. The willingness to continue their investments in this space seems to be driven by the ability to capture new revenue, improve patient outcomes, and improve patient satisfaction by removing the need for patients to present in-person at the clinic. Xealth has several partners helping our customers accomplish these goals.
In Q4 of this year, we’ve added three new RPM vendors to the ecosystem, each helping across different patient conditions and demographics.
All.Health is taking care of adult, at-risk patients with chronic conditions by providing them a wristband and mobile app to monitor their biometric data at home. This data is then shared back with the health system, enabling care teams to proactively identify patient care. All.Health is leveraging many Xealth features to aid this workflow, including filing discrete data back to the EHR that then enables the health system to bill for various RPM codes.
Adult patients, ages 30 – 50, with Chronic Heart Failure are being enrolled with VeeOne’s RPM program and are given a scale to track their daily weights at home. Since we know that weight fluctuation can be a key indicator for cardiac output, it’s important that these changes be shared with the care team. VeeOne leverages Xealth’s ability to share data back with the care team to help manage patient care and ultimately reduce readmissions. VeeOne uses Smartmeter scales that leverage a cellular connection, making the program more broadly accessible by patients who may not have reliable internet connections at home.
It’s not just the adults that can be engaged with remote patient monitoring. Locus Health is offering a cardiology RPM program for complex pediatric patients that aims to reduce readmission rates for those patients who are using enteral feeding and trach vents. With the Xealth integration, teams are able to leverage an existing EHR order to drive patient enrollments into the program and share important data with the care team directly within the EHR. Ultimately this workflow supports both the patients and their families and keeps them where they want to be – at home.
In other Xealth Partner news:
We’ve added provider referrals for Foodsmart, which is a payor sponsored initiative for one of our Health System customers and their Health Plan counterpart. Prior to the launch with Xealth, patients learned about Foodsmart’s personalized nutrition programs via word of mouth at various primary care clinics. Now with Xealth’s distribution pathways, patients who qualify for the covered benefit are automatically made aware of the program via email and text at various points before and after their appointments.
We, alongside our Health System customers, have been able to quickly deploy a second install of our Emmi integration. The integration, first launched earlier in 2023, now supports a second customer with delivering a more streamlined distribution of patient education across various disease states.