Abbott announced the U.S. launch of Jot Dx™, the company’s latest insertable cardiac monitor (ICM). The Jot Dx™ ICM gives clinicians and hospitals control of how they manage the flow of information through a unique feature to view either all abnormal heart rhythm data or to simplify which irregular heart rhythms are recorded with a “key episodes” option. This technology allows for remote detection and improved diagnosis accuracy of cardiac arrythmia in patients. Jot Dx™ ICM is supported by SyncUP™, a personalized service that delivers one-on-one training and education to help patients get connected and stay connected to their ICM.

An arrhythmia is an abnormal heart rhythm that develops when disease or injury disrupts the heart’s electrical signals, causing the heart to beat erratically. As a result, arrhythmias can lead to symptoms such as palpitations, dizziness, shortness of breath or fainting. The most common arrhythmia is atrial fibrillation, or AFib, which is projected to impact more than half of the worldwide population by 2050.2

“Over the past year, there has been an increased focus on telehealth and connected care technology. This has provided access to more data, adding to the time needed to assess patients thoroughly,” said John Costello, D.O., Electrophysiology at The Heart House, Marlton, New Jersey. “With the Jot Dx key episodes option, the ability to distil information is a distinct, time-saving enhancement that helps care teams make important, life-saving clinical care decisions faster.”

Leveraging the Potential of Connected Care

To better help physicians diagnose their patients’ abnormal heart rhythms, Jot Dx™ ICM continuously monitors patient cardiac rhythms 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and connects directly to myMerlin™, a downloadable mobile app that transmits data in real-time to both the clinician and patient. For the first time in an ICM, Jot provides clinicians increased control over patient monitoring, with an option to toggle between viewing only three key episodes or all episodes depending on individual patient needs to make and accurate diagnosis. This functionality reduces overall data burden. For example, for every 100 patients, it can save clinic staff up to 120 hours per month in reviewing electromyogram (EGM) transmissions3 while also providing the flexibility needed to find hard-to-detect arrhythmias.

In addition to improving workflow for physicians, clinics and health systems monitoring patients with potential abnormal heart rhythms, Abbott is also improving how patients interact with their device. A key element in the setup of Jot Dx™ ICM and the myMerlin™ mobile app is the new SyncUP™ support service, which Abbott offers on select products as part of its connected care portfolio. With SyncUP™, an Abbott support expert will enroll a patient with a newly implanted device in the system, orient them through getting to know their new heart monitoring device and confirm connection to the myMerlin™ app.

SyncUP™ is designed to educate people about the technology from the comfort of home, which has been shown to increase information retention and encourage compliance4, and helps reduce in-clinic burden. Currently, the process to ensure a patient is connected is conducted in the healthcare facility directly following the device’s implant, which prolongs the stay for the patient. SyncUP™ also support patients with Abbott’s implantable defibrillator, Gallant™ ICD.

Once connected, clinicians can monitor patients remotely, allowing for identification of asymptomatic episodes, as well as patient-triggered transmissions, which can lead to earlier intervention. Remote monitoring can shorten the time for doctors to diagnosis and make a care decision, if needed.5,6

“Technology can be intimidating, particularly when your heart is relying on it,” said Heidi Hinrichs, divisional vice president of global clinical and regulatory for Abbott’s Cardiac Rhythm Management business. “With Jot Dx™ ICM, myMerlin™, SyncUP™ and our other technologies, we want people to feel supported, knowledgeable and confident when using them, and ultimately, in control of their care. We understand healthcare is not one-size-fits-all and have learned from the people who use our products that a patient-centric approach can lead to a more manageable heart health experience.”

Abbott myMerlin™

The myMerlin™ mobile app collects information from a patient’s heart device and sends it to their healthcare team. The app allows patients to engage more frequently with their healthcare team by providing access to transmission history and device performance, and the app can prompt patients to schedule their next appointment. The app also lets patients record symptoms when they are felt —making diagnosis easier than ever.

About Abbott

Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare, with leading businesses and products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutritionals and branded generic medicines. Our 109,000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.

Well Health Inc., a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach, launches ChatAssist AI to enable better communications between healthcare providers and their patients. ChatAssist AI builds on the existing, top-rated WELL™ Health platform and uses a sophisticated Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engine.

ChatAssist AI builds on the existing, top-rated WELL Health platform and uses a sophisticated NLU engine.

“ChatAssist AI automates thousands of conversations between patients and providers, and gracefully hands off to staff when human intervention is required,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Founder, WELL Health. “ChatAssist AI can independently navigate complex, multi-step patient communications, resulting in a positive experience for both patients and staff. Patient satisfaction improves with a faster response time from providers and staff are freed up to focus on high-touch interactions that their jobs demand.”

Promising Pilot Results
ChatAssist AI is instrumental in helping busy healthcare providers. Epic EMR customer, Sansum Clinic, which serves 130,000 patients from 23 locations across California’s Central Coast, piloted ChatAssist AI for six months with a focus on:

• Telehealth
• Portal enrollment
• Insurance verification
• COVID vaccinations

The ChatAssist AI pilot results showed:

95 percent of the conversations were successfully completed without staff intervention1, among the ChatAssist AI conversations where patients responded.
13 different ChatAssist AI use cases resulted in 35,000 fully automated patient conversations2, totaling 546 hours of staff time saved3 (within six months of deployment).

“ChatAssist AI has been our Swiss Army knife for addressing the range of communication challenges we’ve faced over the past year, particularly in vaccine distribution,” said Karen Handy, Vice President of Operations, Sansum Clinic. “WELL Health ChatAssist AI improved our customer experience with personalized messaging while saving an incredible amount of staff time. We’re continuing to use WELL Health ChatAssist AI to address even more use cases and enable us to quickly and nimbly respond to our patients with the power of digital communications.”

ChatAssist AI Details
ChatAssist AI can understand and respond to millions of diverse, unstructured patient responses on behalf of health systems, allowing patients to engage using their own words (in English and Spanish) and their preferred channels, and receive real-time, conversational responses from their providers. ChatAssist AI combines these natural language understanding capabilities with healthcare specific use case capabilities to deliver reliable and cutting-edge solutions.

ChatAssist AI is built to deliver a conversational experience to patients, incorporating industry leading AI capabilities and configurable healthcare workflows and content to improve patient and staff experience. WELL Health will continue to expand on these innovative capabilities through the use of AI and other technologies that deliver value to patients, staff, and healthcare systems.

About Well Health Inc.
WELL™ Health is a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and the 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach. The WELL Health intelligent communications hub is the only two-way digital health solution engaging patients throughout their entire care experience. WELL Health enables conversations between patients and their providers through secure, multilingual (19 different languages) messaging in the patient’s preferred communications channel: texting, email, telephone, and live chat. WELL Health helps 200,000+ providers facilitate more than 1.1 billion messages for 37 million patients annually. By unifying and automating disjointed communications across healthcare organizations, WELL Health reduces unnecessary provider stress and potential errors, while increasing patient visits and loyalty.

Surescripts has expanded its interoperable solutions to bring actionable clinical intelligence into the care process and help providers proactively follow up with patients experiencing significant care events. These new clinical intelligence solutions notify providers in their electronic health record (EHR) software of clinical and medication events so that they can address lapses in care, missed care interventions, medication non-adherence and gaps in care that plague the system today.

Is the patient taking their medication as prescribed? Providers simply won’t know—at least not until the patient shows back up to the hospital for readmission. Address gaps in care and non-adherence with actionable clinical intelligence.
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Healthcare interoperability alone isn’t enough. Clinical intelligence that is accurate, timely and actionable is the next step in our journey for closing costly gaps in care,” explained Mike Pritts, Chief Product Officer of Surescripts. With these new solutions, care management teams and healthcare organizations can build better and more efficient care management programs that drive better health outcomes.

Surescripts Care Event Notifications and an enhanced Medication History for Populations service that includes patient notifications allow providers, including care managers, to proactively reach out to patients experiencing significant care events, lapses in care, adherence issues or adverse drug events. Together, these solutions give providers insight into events such as the patient going to a doctor, presenting at a hospital and being admitted or discharged. They also offer updates for certain prescription activities such as a refill not being picked up, a new prescription from a new provider and no refills remaining. By receiving these notifications in their EHR workflow, providers can take steps to follow-up or intervene with the patient before they even schedule an appointment or show up at their facility.

“Visibility into patients’ prior care events and medication history helps care teams effectively coordinate care and improve health outcomes,” said Andrew Mellin, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Surescripts. “With the clinical intelligence conveyed through these interoperability solutions, health teams can fill in information gaps and bring actionable patient intelligence into their care management workflows, so care navigators can focus on engaging patients at the right time.”

These solutions address key issues facing healthcare today, including the more than $105 billion of avoidable healthcare costs that have been attributed to non-adherence in the U.S. each year. As of May 1, 2021, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires hospitals to send electronic patient event notifications of a patient’s admission, discharge, or transfer to another healthcare facility, community provider or practitioner. With 26% of physicians not receiving hospital discharge summaries in time for most follow-up appointments, this rule is intended to improve care coordination by allowing a receiving provider, facility, or practitioner to reach out to the patient and deliver appropriate follow-up care in a timely manner.

Visit Surescripts.com to learn how these solutions deliver clinical intelligence, not only to connect care providers but help them make more informed care decisions for their patients.

About Surescripts

Our purpose is to serve the nation with the single most trusted and capable health information network, built to increase patient safety, lower costs and ensure quality care. Since 2001, Surescripts has led the movement to turn data into actionable intelligence, and convened the Surescripts Network Alliance® to enhance prescribing, inform care decisions and advance the healthcare industry.

Biofourmis, a Boston-based global leader in virtual care and digital therapeutics, announced its BiovitalsHF® solution is the first-ever heart failure digital therapeutic to receive a Breakthrough Device designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). BiovitalsHF® is a software medical application that augments guideline-directed use of heart failure medications to manage patients in combination with traditional pharmacotherapy.

The Breakthrough Devices Program was created to provide patients and providers with timely access to medical devices by speeding up their development, assessment and review while preserving the statutory standards for premarket approval, 510(k) clearance, and De Novo marketing authorization, according to the FDA.

“This important breakthrough designation will help accelerate FDA’s final review of BiovitalsHF®,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO and founder of Biofourmis. “If approved at the end of this expedited process, we look forward to introducing a new virtual heart failure care model that leverages the BiovitalsHF® digital therapeutic to improve the use and dosing of Guideline-Directed Medical Therapy among patients with heart failure, for better patient outcomes and reduced healthcare expenditures.”

Heart failure remains the leading cause of hospitalization for patients over age 65. In the U.S., approximately 6.2 million patients live with heart failure, which carries an annual cost that is expected to reach $70 billion by 2030. Guideline-Directed Medical Therapy (GDMT) is a cornerstone of the management of individuals with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). Timely initiation and dose intensifications of GDMT continue to be a major challenge in realizing clinical trial outcomes in the real world, despite the availability of guidelines from professional societies such as the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. This is evidenced by research that shows less than 1% of heart failure patients are on the optimal dose of their HF medication and less than 25% of eligible patients receive GDMT. Clinical decisions regarding the use and dosing of GDMT among HFrEF patients must take into consideration various factors, including medical history, vital signs (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), laboratory data (e.g., electrolytes, creatinine), and patient symptoms, as well as medication-related side effects. Currently, these decisions are made by the clinical care team periodically during in-person or virtual clinical interactions based on data gathered from disparate data sources (e.g., patients, electronic medical record, etc.).

BiovitalsHF® augments clinical decision-making with the goal of personalizing and improving the use and dose of GDMT among patients with HFrEF. The device integrates physiological monitoring, symptoms and signs reporting, patient engagement, medication management, and communication to provide clinicians with personalized and specific medication recommendations. The system alleviates some of the problems that prevent GDMT titration because: a) it enables patient health status and drug tolerance to be accurately assessed through continuous physiology monitoring and inclusion of lab assessment results for analysis; b) it reduces clinical inertia by prompting clinicians and patients on medication initiation and up-titration; c) it reduces the burden of clinical visits through a patient-clinician communication system, which becomes essential in circumstances such as a pandemic; and d) it requires less resources than nurse-led programs, because titration recommendations from the HFrEF management guidelines are distilled in the system.

“The BiovitalsHF® digital therapeutic is a software medical application that enables providers to rapidly initiate and intensify life-saving and guideline-recommended medical therapies for patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction in a way that is nearly automated,” said Maulik Majmudar, MD, cardiologist and chief medical officer and co-founder of Biofourmis. “In a proof-of-concept study, in patients using BiovitalsHF®, we demonstrated statistically significant improvements in adherence to GDMT; reduction in levels of the key blood biomarker of heart failure NT-ProBNP; and improvements in health status.”

Dr. Majmudar added: “BiovitalsHF® gets patients on the right therapies faster, which studies have shown helps save lives, prevents emergency department visits and hospital admissions, and enables patients to have a better quality of life. The FDA Breakthrough Devices program was created to help bring effective treatment of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating conditions to market sooner, and BiovitalsHF® is a perfect candidate for this program due to its clinical importance and impact.”

About Biofourmis
Biofourmis is a global leader in virtual care and digital therapeutics, offering an innovative and comprehensive Care@Home platform that enables clinicians to deliver personalized predictive care to patients outside of a traditional hospital or clinic across the continuum of care, including acute, post-acute, and chronic care. Biovitals®, a highly sophisticated AI-powered health analytics platform, utilizes medical-grade wearables to continuously collect patient data to predict clinical exacerbation in advance of a critical event, which enables earlier interventions and leads to better clinical and financial outcomes.

https://www.biofourmis.com/press-releases/biovitalshf-fda-breakthrough-designation-approval/

Baxter International Inc., a leading global medical products company, announced its Baxter Healthcare Corporation subsidiary has completed the acquisition of certain assets related to PerClot Polysaccharide Hemostatic System from CryoLife, Inc (NYSE:CRY) for up to $60.8 million, including $25 million paid upfront. The remainder will be paid out upon achievement of certain select milestones. The transaction reinforces Baxter’s strategy of acquiring products and technologies that both complement and augment the company’s leading portfolio across the hospital, including in the operating room. PerClot has a global commercial presence with sales in more than 35 countries worldwide. It is not currently cleared for sale in the United States.

“The addition of PerClot further enhances our ability to optimize patient care by addressing a broad range of intraoperative bleeding with both active and passive hemostatic solutions, helping surgeons to use the right product for the right bleed,” said Wil Boren, president of Baxter’s Advanced Surgery business. “PerClot launches Baxter into the attractive hemostatic powder segment, while expanding our surgical offerings and complementing our recent acquisition of Seprafilm Adhesion Barrier.”

Addressing intraoperative bleeding is important in preventing blood transfusions and major complications for patients, as well as reducing the total cost of care. A blood management strategy that includes effective hemostasis is especially critical in today’s environment, given current worldwide shortages of blood donations and products due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A recent retrospective analysis found that implementing a framework that incorporates patient factors and a bleeding severity tool, such as Baxter’s Validated Intraoperative Bleeding Scale (VIBe SCALE), can support optimal hemostatic product selection.[1]

A polysaccharide hemostatic powder can be used as an adjunctive hemostat to facilitate control of bleeding from capillary, venous or arteriolar vessels to address low-grade intraoperative bleeding.[2] PerClot is composed of plant starch that is modified to create an adhesive hemostatic powder. It is used as an adjunctive hemostatic device to control bleeding during multiple open and laparoscopic surgical procedures, including gynecologic, general, cardiovascular and urology. PerClot rapidly absorbs water from blood to produce a gelled matrix that adheres to and forms a mechanical barrier with the bleeding tissue.

About Baxter

Every day, millions of patients and caregivers rely on Baxter’s leading portfolio of critical care, nutrition, renal, hospital and surgical products. For 90 years, we’ve been operating at the critical intersection where innovations that save and sustain lives meet the healthcare providers that make it happen. With products, technologies and therapies available in more than 100 countries, Baxter’s employees worldwide are now building upon the company’s rich heritage of medical breakthroughs to advance the next generation of transformative healthcare innovations.

Hollywood teeth are a cosmetic dentistry procedure otherwise known as Hollywood Smile. It refers to a practice in dentistry that uses thin porcelain shells shaped like teeth to cover all existing mishaps. This procedure first originated in the early 20s, and since then has shaped beauty standards in Hollywood.

Although Hollywood teeth have come very far from their humble beginnings, it’s entirely owing to the inconveniences of the first ever procedure which motivated dentistry practices to develop.

What Are Hollywood Teeth?

Hollywood teeth refers to veneers, a very common practice in cosmetic dentistry. Using porcelain shells, your doctor cements these veneers on to the front of your teeth covering all the defects. From correcting irreversible pigmentation, gapping, chipping, breaking, and even mild to moderate misalignment. To make your Hollywood teeth fit perfectly perfectly, your doctor has to first shave down your teeth and then take impressions of your mouth. Typically, the impressions are done manually where you’re expected to bit onto a mould. More advanced technologies are so available and they use computer-assisted cameras to take accurate impressions of your mouth.

Depending on where you choose to opt for the procedure, you can get it done extremely professionally or mediocrely.  For instance, state-of-the-art clinics like Dentakay provide an entirely and excellently customizable Hollywood teeth procedure where the advanced technologies can give you a smile that brings out your unique and natural beauty.

Do I Have to Have My Teeth Shaved Down for the Procedure?

There are two types of Hollywood teeth and only one requires the shaving of your teeth. There’s veneers and lumineers. Veneers are the thicker and option used to hide severe mishaps. Hence, they require your teeth to be shaved down in order to make space for their installation.

On the other hand, you have the lumineers, these are ultra slim shells and are suitable for cases with minor mishaps. Because they are extremely fine in width, your dentist doesn’t need to file down your teeth to place them.

How Long Do Results Last?

Results of the Hollywood teeth procedure can last up to a decade. Porcelain is a very durable material and with the right care the veneers can stay intact. Some of the points you have to keep in mind to get the best out of your smile makeover is that dental hygiene is key and that applying pressure to your teeth or opening items using your teeth is to be avoided at all times.

Can I Get My Hollywood Teeth in One Day?

There are many advanced technologies such as the CAD/CAM system which makes it possible to get the procedure within 2 to 3 days. This system uses computer-assisted cameras to take impressions of your mouth and then send them to a software that designs the most suitable shape of veneers for you. This data is then sent to a 3D printer that manufactures the veneers immediately.

Contact Dentakay

To learn more about the Hollywood teeth procedure, contact the leading Istanbul-based Dentakay.