BioIntelliSense and VeeMed have announced a collaboration to offer scalable remote patient monitoring (RPM) by incorporating innovative technology in wearables and analytics.

Currently used RPM is expensive, complicated to install and offers only episodic measurements, the companies said. The merged capabilities of VeeMed and BioIntelliSense are expected to enable a high-resolution longitudinal view of the health status of the patient.

Virtual care technology, applied analytics and the proven SaaS platform of VeeMed will be combined with BioIntelliSense’s medical-grade wearables. The aim is to offer a complete RPM suite that could provide actionable, multi-parameter information to doctors.

Furthermore, the combination can potentially be used for various clinical use case applications to track in-patient status as well as observe individuals who have complex care requirements after discharge.

BioIntelliSense CEO James Mault said: “Traditional RPM is like a photograph, providing a snapshot of a patient’s health, as opposed to our continuous data service, which is like a high resolution 4K video that offers a composite view.”

The company offers BioSticker and BioButton ‘stick it on and forget it’ multi-parameter wearable devices, which are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

In December last year, BioIntelliSense and Royal Philips announced $2.8m funding from the US Department of Defense to validate a BioSticker device for the early detection of symptoms related to Covid-19.

VeeMed chief medical officer and president Dr Arshad Ali said: “Our partnership with BioIntelliSense enables us to give patients the freedom and flexibility to receive medical-grade remote care, but with the same level of confidence they would have if they were at a clinic or physician’s office, or even in the hospital.

“By giving patients an effortless wearable experience to seamlessly capture continuous vital sign data via our telehealth platform, healthcare systems can deliver the absolute, most advanced RPM care.” The VeeMed portfolio includes telemedicine solutions for various patient care settings, including outpatient and remote monitoring.

Mayo Clinic is ramping up activity in the remote patient monitoring arena. Its latest move is a collaboration with biomedical technology company NXgenPort, which will focus on an implantable catheter that can remotely monitor cancer patients for complications as they undergo treatment.

Just a month after Mayo Clinic announced the launch of Lucem Health — a joint venture that collects and normalizes data from remote devices — the health system is making another move in the remote patient monitoring arena.

On Tuesday, the Rochester, Minnesota-based health system said it is collaborating with a biomedical technology company to support the development of a cancer-focused remote patient monitoring tool.

The company is NXgenPort, headquartered in Minneapolis and Ventura, California. The company’s medical device helps providers monitor cancer patients at home with an implantable chemo-port catheter. The device, which is patent-pending, can remotely monitor the early onset of complications by tracking patient response via microelectronic sensors. It then notifies clinicians about changes in heart function, oxygen levels and blood cell counts, among other clinical indicators, during the course of cancer treatment.

During the one-year collaboration, NXgenPort leaders will meet weekly with Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Tufia Haddad, a breast cancer specialist and medical director of the health system’s Center for Digital Health. They will discuss port design, market adoption and data collection, said Cathy Skinner, co-founder and CEO of NXgenPort, in an email.

“Dr. Haddad [will] share her expertise in regard to the needs of patients and the needs of physicians when it comes to remote patient monitoring,” she said.

The partnership is based on a know-how license agreement, which means NXgenPort will have access to the insights and expertise of the Mayo Clinic thought leader. Too often, companies waste time and resources building products that do not fit within the workflow of clinicians or the needs of organizations, Skinner said in a news release. This agreement will help NXgenPort avoid that misstep.

Skinner declined to say whether Mayo Clinic will have any rights over the product once the collaboration is over, as terms of the agreement are confidential.

Mayo Clinic is not the only health system interested in oncology-focused remote patient monitoring. In December, New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System deployed Current Health’s remote patient monitoring solution to enhance care for cancer patients amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Accenture opened the application period for the fifth annual Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge, which seeks to support innovative solutions for improving the way people access, receive, manage and finance healthcare in North America.

Now in its fifth year, the Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge brings healthcare organizations and start-ups together to tackle the world’s biggest health issues. The industry is at a pivotal moment, and the health leaders of today and tomorrow will be those that can harness the power of technology and human ingenuity to put the human at the heart of everything they do. To apply, health start-ups will find the submission form, including additional details about the challenge’s criteria, eligibility, and requirements at Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge.

“Each year we look forward to the new solutions that innovative start-ups develop for healthcare organizations to improve health outcomes and health operations,” said Brian Kalis, managing director of digital health and innovation at Accenture. “The past year the pandemic presented many challenges, but it also accelerated the adoption of digital technology that helped deliver better healthcare experiences for consumers and clinicians. We look forward to exploring the novel ideas that emerging start-ups are bringing to the market.”

“The Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge identifies startups who are solving healthcare industry challenges in unique ways,” said Shally Pannikode, SVP and CIO with Humana. “There is an appetite for new ideas and this year’s cohort really have an opportunity to question the status quo with solutions that improve healthcare outcomes.”

Emerging healthcare technology innovators and disruptors that provide their services and solutions in North America are encouraged to apply for the program. Submissions from eligible companies will be accepted through 11:59 p.m. ET on July 2nd. The three categories for this year’s Accenture HealthTech Innovation Challenge are:

Increased Access: Solutions that can expand access to services and treatments for health organizations. Examples include virtual care, digital therapeutics, home and remote healthcare delivery models, and new care models for underserved needs.
Consumer & Clinician Experience: Solutions that can create positive consumer and clinician experiences. Consumer experience examples include solutions that improve wellbeing, care coordination, disease prevention and chronic condition management.
Operational Efficiency: Solutions that look to increase enterprise efficiency and core day-to-day processes. Examples include back office solutions, and patient, data, and distribution management.

Accenture is seeking applications that are focused on healthcare organization buyers. Key criteria for applicants include desirability (customer need), viability (business model), feasibility (scalability), and purpose. Health organizations are defined as public health entities, private payers, provider systems, delivery networks, retail health companies and organizations that participate in the healthcare delivery and payment ecosystem.

Selected finalists will present to an exclusive panel of judges comprised of senior executives from globally recognized health companies at a virtual event to be held on September 28.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services — all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 537,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners, and communities.

The CEO Coalition announced that the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and Vocera Communications, Inc. are collaborating to catalyze the work of the Coalition to improve the physical and psychological safety of the nation’s healthcare workforce. The organizations will turn the CEO Coalition’s Heart of Safety: Declaration of Principles into action by identifying, measuring, and sharing evidence-based practices that support the three pillars of safety outlined in the Declaration: emotional and psychological safety, health justice, and physical safety.

“We want to build a future in which every care team member feels protected and safe at work,” said Robert C. Garrett, FACHE, CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health. Garrett, Co-Chair of the CEO Coalition, joined forces with nine other health system leaders from across the country to declare a renewed commitment to improving safety, well-being, and equity for all who work in healthcare.

“We believe success lies in collaboration and invite other health systems to partner with us in this critical work,” said Laura Kaiser, President and CEO of SSM Health, and a Co-Founder of the CEO Coalition. “By leveraging our collective expertise and best practices, we can move much more quickly to improve the safety and well-being of our nation’s healthcare workers. Our caregivers deserve to feel safe.”

The Heart of Safety: Declaration of Principles, authored by the CEO Coalition, expands the definition of safety to include protecting psychological and emotional well-being of team members, promoting health justice by declaring equity and anti-racism core components of safety, and ensuring physical safety, which includes a zero-harm program to eliminate workplace violence, both physical and verbal.

“The well-being of the healthcare workforce, including physical and psychological safety, is essential for delivering high-quality patient care,” said Kedar Mate, MD, President and CEO of IHI. “We look forward to working with the CEO Coalition to drive meaningful improvements in safety across our health systems and to elevate discussions in the industry about how to foster equitable workforce safety.”

These topics and more will be featured in the IHI Patient Safety Congress 2021 taking place May 11-13. The virtual event will bring together healthcare leaders and practitioners who are passionate about ensuring safe, equitable care for all. Attendees can learn more about the CEO Coalition and the Declaration of Principles during a live, interactive discussion from 1-2 p.m. ET, on Tuesday, May 11.

“We are proud to collaborate with IHI and the CEO Coalition to amplify the great work of the co-founders and support the mission to protect the nation’s healthcare workforce,” said Brent Lang, Chairman and CEO of Vocera. “Now is the time to find innovative and sustainable ways to keep our care teams safe from emotional, physical, and psychological harm and to make it clear that health justice is an essential component of safety. We are committed to supporting this group of industry leaders as they turn words into action.”

About the CEO Coalition

The CEO Coalition, co-founded by 10 health system CEOs across the U.S., is on a mission to protect the physical safety, emotional well-being, and just treatment of all who work in healthcare. Focused on the heart of safety, the CEO Coalition published a Declaration of Principles outlining three pillars of change needed to build a future of caring, trust, and health justice. The co-founders of the CEO Coalition have sparked a national movement and are turning the Declaration into an action plan for meaningful and sustainable change.

Patient engagement technology leaders SONIFI Health and CipherHealth have announced a new strategic partnership aimed at supporting healthcare providers and improving patient outcomes across the care continuum.

As healthcare systems continue to look for operational efficiencies that improve patient care without overburdening staff, SONIFI and CipherHealth have come together to improve their workflows and processes. The new partnership leverages key capabilities of both solution providers to offer health systems a more holistic approach to patient communications and successful care planning.

“CipherHealth’s partnership with SONIFI Health is a natural fit, as our solutions complement each other throughout the patient journey,” said Alex Hejnosz, Chief Strategy Officer at CipherHealth. “Together, we’re poised to help hospitals improve patient experience, care team satisfaction, and post-discharge outcomes.”

SONIFI and CipherHealth’s customers will benefit from optimization strategies for key outcome areas such as patient education, service recovery, and care transitions. Using CipherHealth’s communication solutions before, during, and after a hospital stay, as well as SONIFI’s interactive patient engagement system for inpatient care, providers can achieve better patient outcomes with maximum efficiency.

“As an organization committed to delivering exceptional care experiences, we’ve seen how technology can support that mission,” said Vanessa Mona, Director of Care Experience for Henry Ford Health System. The Detroit-based health system is building impactful use cases with the two technology providers, including access to the health system’s robust patient education materials.

“The partnership between SONIFI Health and CipherHealth can help us reach our goals faster,” said Mona. “We look forward to exploring new strategies under this partnership that would enhance our patient care experience.”

“SONIFI Health and CipherHealth are like-minded organizations, offering technology that benefits patients and clinicians, and bolsters patient-provider relationships with the level of trust that is foundational for patient outcomes,” said Roy Kosuge, SONIFI Health General Manager. “We’re excited to bring health systems smart technology implementations that can improve healthcare now and in the future.”

About SONIFI Health
SONIFI Health delivers interactive technology solutions proven to improve patient engagement, outcomes and staff productivity. The system is delivered across multiple technology platforms including mobile devices, televisions, computers and digital displays to enhance patient and family experience while increasing hospital operational efficiencies. As part of SONIFI Solutions Inc., the company supports more than 500 million end user experiences per year.

About CipherHealth
CipherHealth is an award-winning and proven technology solutions leader committed to enhancing communication and care throughout the patient journey for all those involved. Since 2009, CipherHealth has helped shape the patient and staff engagement category, delivering groundbreaking products to help care providers effectively and efficiently deliver quality care for their patients. CipherHealth’s suite of digital engagement programs sets new standards for care and empowers healthcare organizations to foster meaningful connections to ensure the best possible outcomes for staff members, patients, and their loved ones.

Longenesis, co-founded by Insilico Medicine and other biotech top-tier players, partners with medical device company Medtronic and diabetic patient organizations to pilot a digital patient-centric approach for patient engagement into research and advocacy initiatives. The core of the pilot project is to ensure the highest privacy standards and easy-to-use consent management that would earn patients’ trust and raise engagement for future projects. The digital approach to patient engagement has been the top priority for everyone involved. It reduces the time and costs of the research and advocacy initiative while making it more accessible and results more representative.

The lack of an individual approach for patient engagement has left them with a vague understanding of their role in these processes, and therefore slowing down many initiatives aiming to improve their quality of life through advocacy and research. To tackle the issue a new digital solution is introduced under the study that will ensure a smoother engagement process via dynamic patient identification, digital onboarding, and follow-up communication using Longenesis flagship products – Longenesis Engagement and Longenesis Curator.

“Advocacy is an integral part of the patient organisation’s work, however, up until now it has also been a huge struggle. To ensure that patient needs and wishes are taken seriously, and their best interests are put first, we need to engage them in an ongoing dialogue. Many factors hinder this process, a few of which are their varying capabilities as well as distrust that comes with any chronic condition. For this reason, we are excited to partner up with Longenesis. We believe that their patient engagement and data curation solutions will give us the necessary access not only to diabetic patients but also to research partners that might benefit their needs. We hope that the ongoing project is just the start,” says Indra Stelmane, Endocrinologist, PhD and president of Latvian Diabetes Federation.

The new collaboration with Medtronic and patient advocacy bodies in Latvia is aimed to provide patient advocates, investigators, and industrial stakeholders with a better understanding of what is happening outside of the clinical disease setting. Through the engagement solutions, patient organizations and investigators take part in data insight generation, necessary for efficient advocacy efforts.

“Flexible digital consent allows study participants to control their involvement in the study by calmly going through the informed consent document, and to sign or revoke it at any time. This opportunity increases people’s trust in researchers and science as such. Digital tools that allow researchers to invite a cohort of people who meet the criteria for inclusion in a study is a new and advanced method of engaging research participants” says Lilian Tzivian, PhD, a leading epidemiologist at the University of Latvia.

A complimentary digital solution – Curator platform, developed by Longenesis, enables patient advocates to communicate their generated data insights to other stakeholders for collaborative research attraction, and further engagement in treatment efficacy, drug post-market validation and other studies without compromising patient privacy.

Medtronic Baltic office representative reveals that “Preparation and execution of type 1 diabetes research and advocacy project is Medtronic’s first cooperation with Longenesis. We highly value the professional attitude, friendly communication, and efficient and quick work of the team to prepare and execute the research project. The digital approach and tools used by Longenesis for this project have greatly impacted the speed of patient enrolment, are easy to use by participants and researchers and comply with the highest standards of safety, data protection and are participant-centric.”

Emil Syundyukov, CTO of Longenesis tells: “With a multi-stakeholder approach, Longenesis aims to scale this concept within the EU framework and present the results achieved by our solutions to academic and industrial partners worldwide. Longenesis aims to bring opportunities to the industry for robust and patient-centred research and apply it universally among multiple disease groups, regions, and institutions”.

About Longenesis

Longenesis, co-founded by Insilico Medicine and other top-tier biotech players, is a medical technology start-up company providing a technological bridge between healthcare institutions and the Biotech industry to unlock the hidden value of biomedical data and accelerate the novel drug and treatment discovery. Our team has experience working with biomedical organizations and unlocking the potential for accelerating the R&D process around the globe, including National level projects in the Middle East, U.S., EU, and APAC regions.

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine develops software that leverages generative models, reinforcement learning (RL), and other modern machine learning techniques to generate new molecular structures with specific properties. Insilico Medicine also develops software for the generation of synthetic biological data, target identification, and the prediction of clinical trial outcomes. The company integrates two business models: providing AI-powered drug discovery services and software through its Pharma.AI platform and developing its pipeline of preclinical programs. The preclinical program is the result of pursuing novel drug targets and novel molecules discovered through its platforms. Since its inception in 2014, Insilico Medicine has raised over $52 million and received multiple industry awards. Insilico Medicine has also published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has applied for over 25 patents. Website

SIFI, a leading international ophthalmic company, announces it has entered into a strategic multi-year agreement with Bausch Health Russia to market its innovative products treating ophthalmic disorders in Russia.

Initial sales are expected in 2021, marketing 5 SIFI products, segments of a comprehensive and established ophthalmic portfolio. These include:

• COLBIOCIN™, NETTAVISC™ and NETTACIN™, antibiotic solutions indicated for the treatment of external eye infections and available in multiple dosage forms;
• OCTILIA™, an eye-drop solution indicated for the treatment of irritations, reddening, ocular congestion and itching due to allergic, chemical or physical causes;
• MIRTILENE FORTE CAPSULES, a retinotrophic vasoprotective food supplement, helpful in cases of capillary fragility or vascular alterations due to diabetic retinopathy.

Bausch Health Russia will have the option to commercialize future SIFI products currently under development.

“SIFI is committed to continuous development and expansion and is pleased to announce this strategic partnership with Bausch Health Russia,” said Gilberto Dalesio, SIFI’s CCO. “By joining forces SIFI will strengthen its global footprint and establish its presence in Russia, one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical markets in the world, and will enable Russian eye care doctors to address a wide variety of ophthalmic disorders, delivering significant benefits to Russian patients.”

“Bausch Health is pleased to partner with SIFI, because together we can ensure Russian eye health doctors and their patients have greater access to these important ophthalmic medications,” said Cees Heiman, Vice President Europe/Russia Pharmaceuticals, Bausch Health.

About SIFI

SIFI is a leading ophthalmic company, headquartered in Italy, focusing on eye care since 1935. SIFI develops, manufactures and markets innovative therapeutic solutions for patients with ophthalmic diseases. SIFI is committed to improve patients’ quality of life through its R&D efforts, exporting products to more than 20 countries worldwide with commercial operations in Italy, Spain, France, Romania, Mexico and Turkey.