Three years in the market, the spencer® Direct-to-Patient platform is consistently demonstrating a new standard of greater than 95% adherence among chronically-ill patients. Adherence for some individuals managing on average seven medications daily has reached 97% this year.

“No matter what you throw at spencer, patients remain adherent,” said Alan Menius, CSO with Spencer Health Solutions, the RTP-based health technology company that developed the spencer platform to help people manage their health and medications from home. “I haven’t found a therapy area, comorbidity or demographic where that population of spencer patients’ adherence level differs compared to other spencer patients.”

In addition to taking their medications as prescribed, the patients – most with at least two chronic illnesses, used spencer’s touch screen to answer health questions 75% of the time. Tailored by disease, or personalized for individuals, the questions are designed to capture patient feedback with each pre-packaged medication dispense.

Initially introduced in the care management market, the telehealth platform is now available in clinical research where it extends patient reach in hybrid trials. Studies show that 40% of patients become non-adherent within the first 150 days of a clinical trial.

“Interacting with spencer is habit forming, making it an ideal platform to conduct real world studies,” said Tom Rhoads, Spencer Health CEO. “Adherence to trial drugs leads to better evidence in clinical research.”

Menius analyzed data for patients using spencer over at least six months, and some for up to three years, in their homes in the U.S and Canada. While 76% of spencer patients have two or more chronic conditions, 44% have three or more. Central nervous system disorders – including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression – account for 61% of patient conditions; while cardiovascular conditions, such as congestive heart failure (CHF), hypertension and elevated cholesterol, are treated in 43% of the user group.

The average age of current spencer users is 68, with 53% of the population female and 47% male. Half of the patients take between five and 11 medications, vitamins and supplements every day.

About Spencer Health Solutions

Advancing research and healthcare from the home. Bring new treatments to market faster and at lower cost with the spencer® Direct to Patient platform. Spencer Health Solutions, Inc.’s award-winning spencer® technology combines medication dispensing, telehealth and engagement so patients, their health care providers, and clinical research teams stay connected. For more information, visit www.spencerhealthsolutions.com. Follow us on Twitter @spencerhealth

Royal Philips a global leader in health technology, announced a significant development in the digitization of patient treatment in Indonesia, with the country’s first installation of Philips IntelliSpace Critical Care and Anesthesia (ICCA) system at the Kasih Ibu Hospital in Denpasar, Bali. The critical care technology is part of Philips’ broader connected care suite aimed to help ensure seamless care and timely information flow between patients and the healthcare professionals who provide treatment. At Kasih Ibu Hospital, the critical care system will be integrated with Philips Patient Deterioration Solution – a portfolio of solutions to help manage patient deterioration outside the ICU – to better track patient conditions, helping the hospital achieve improved patient care, enhanced patient experience, lower costs and better staff satisfaction.

Leveraging digital technology to help advance acute critical care

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) workflow is quite complex, involving admission/discharge, daily routine care, emergency, and unscheduled events, as well as managing end of life care. The sheer numbers of medications, scans, treatments, and tests administered pose a huge burden on patients and their loved ones, and the complex workflow demands a huge effort from all clinical teams involved. It is estimated there are 178 processes delivered to each ICU patient per day, with 1.7 of them associated with some error [1]. For those teams, decision-making becomes a complex yet time-critical process, made even more difficult by data-overload caused by disparate devices, patient record systems and data sources.

Digitization of healthcare services, especially in hospitals treating emergency and post-surgical patients, is a pressing need worldwide as hospitals cope with meeting surging healthcare demand while not compromising the quality of care and patient safety. As hospitals across the globe team with industry to improve and save lives, Indonesia is no exception. Acute care is particularly challenging, associated with the highest number of medical errors. Nearly all ICU patients suffer a potentially life-threatening error during their stay, with medication errors accounting for 78% of serious medical errors [2]. Decision-making and diagnosis are also more difficult in critical care due to the vulnerability of patients, who can have co-morbidities and deteriorate rapidly.

“Philips is helping to shape the future of healthcare by providing smart patient care and clinical intelligence where and when needed,” said Carla Kriwet, Chief Business Leader of Connected Care at Philips. “With solutions like Philips IntelliSpace Critical Care and Anesthesia, we are combining patient monitoring with connected technology, to help deliver more consistent patient care, seamless patient transitions and improved care. We are committed to help hospitals across Indonesia apply connected care technology to help both patients and medical teams.”

“Kasih Ibu Hospital aspires to become a smart hospital, at the forefront of leveraging health technology innovations, especially in digitization of patient care, in order to meet domestic and foreign patient expectations,” said Krishnawenda Duarsa, President of Kasih Ibu Hospital Group. “We believe our investment in these solutions will help improve our service quality and patient treatment, allowing our medical staff to focus on providing the right care at the right time to help drive improved patient outcomes and better operational efficiency.”

Interoperable digitalized hospital systems for faster and more accurate treatment

Philips IntelliSpace Critical Care and Anesthesia is an advanced clinical decision support and automatic documentation solution, providing analytics, integrated care management and reporting throughout the ICU care cycle. The system centralizes and organizes patient data – including admission documents, vital signs, labs, and consult notes – to help transform patient data into actionable insights, enabling connectivity between medical devices in the ICU to help improve outcomes.

Early Warning Scoring leads to identification of clinical deterioration

The Philips Patient Deterioration Solution consists of an integrated suite of devices, wearable sensors, software, and professional services. The customizable solution is integrated with the hospital EMR (electronic medical record) to help enhance organizational efficiencies and current infrastructure investments. The solution aims to enable caregivers to effectively identify and proactively respond to patient deterioration in hospital wards, help reduce the risk of missed signs of deterioration, improve patient care, and increase efficiencies in patient management and workflow [3].

Leveraging intelligent algorithms and predictive trend analytics, the solution, including IntelliVue GuardianSoftware, helps clinicians identify patient deterioration, notify caregivers and enable appropriate, timely intervention to prioritize patient care. As part of Philips’ goal of improving the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2030, more than 275 million patients are monitored with Philips’ patient monitors each year. Abnormal vital signs or other indications of clinical instability typically appear eight to twelve hours prior to critical event [3]. Through the use of Philips IntelliVue Guardian Software, an automated early warning scoring (EWS) and workflow system, clinicians receive information to help identify subtle warning signs of a patient’s physiological decline for timely intervention.

Clearwave, a leading provider of patient check-in solutions via mobile, kiosk and desktop, announces a new interface with award-winning health IT company, Modernizing Medicine®. This announcement comes as Modernizing Medicine’s 2019 user conference, MOMENTUM, kicks off in Orlando, Fla.

The Clearwave and Modernizing Medicine interface offers a simple and efficient patient registration experience. With this collaboration, Clearwave can seamlessly interface with more practices using Modernizing Medicine’s electronic health record (EHR) system, EMA®, and Practice Management (PM) system to enable a leading solution for front office performance.

Medical professionals using Clearwave and Modernizing Medicine together can help ensure that their patients enjoy ease and efficiency during their appointment check-in. Clearwave has worked for more than a decade to solve the many front-office problems that are faced by medical practices across the nation through practice efficiency, insurance eligibility checks and point-of-service revenue collections.

“Medical professionals are constantly searching for new ways to incorporate cutting-edge technology into their patient experience and workflows,” said Brian Stone, co-founder of Clearwave. “This interface will help allow users to experience seamless patient registration across platforms, enabling them to enhance the way their front office runs.”

Some key benefits this new interface include:

• Data Automation & Accuracy: Patient demographics are sent in near real-time from Clearwave’s patient self-service registration solution to Modernizing Medicine’s PM system to help keep the information updated.
• Improved Front-Office Processes: The front desk team can identify where patients are in their registration process. Appointment statuses are updated within Modernizing Medicine’s PM system, as check-in and tracking statuses are changed in Clearwave’s platform.
• Staff Efficiency: Staff no longer have to scan and make copies, helping them save time to complete other tasks. Scanned driver’s licenses and insurance cards, as well as signed consent forms, are saved to the patient’s medical record, so data is automatically captured and available.
• Convenient Collections: Clearwave’s check-in includes point-of-service collections to streamline collecting copays or past due balances upon check-in.

Steve Bethke, Modernizing Medicine’s senior vice president of product management, shared, “We are pleased to announce this new collaboration to offer our clients solutions that align with their practice workflow and the needs of their patients. This relationship exemplifies our commitment to driving customer delight and providing interoperable solutions.” For more information on Clearwave and its interface with Modernizing Medicine, visit https://www.clearwaveinc.com/clearwave-modmed-partnership.

About Clearwave:
Founded in 2004, Clearwave is the premiere self-service check-in solution for the medical industry. We enable fast, flexible, and effective patient check-in experiences while improving practice economics and performance. Our comprehensive check-in solutions: the patient check-in kiosk and Mobile Pre-Check™ modernize healthcare practices through increased data access, superior revenue collections, and improved insurance verification workflows. Clearwave is Headquartered in Atlanta, GA and is backed by Frontier Capital. To learn more, visit clearwaveinc.com 

About Modernizing Medicine:
Modernizing Medicine® and its affiliated companies empower physicians with suites of mobile, specialty-specific solutions that transform how healthcare information is created, consumed and utilized to increase practice efficiency and improve patient outcomes. Built for value-based healthcare, Modernizing Medicine’s data-driven, touch and cloud-based products and services are programmed by a team that includes practicing physicians to meet the unique needs of dermatology, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, pain management, plastic surgery and urology practices, as well as ambulatory surgery centers. For more information, please visit www.modmed.com.

InterSystems, a global leader in information technology platforms for health, business, and government applications, announced its tremendous performance in the new KLAS® Research report, “Interoperability Platforms 2019.”  InterSystems customers provided highly positive feedback for the company’s tools and technology across all report categories, including use cases, user experience, ease of maintenance and point-of-care. These results reflect the profound difference InterSystems is making in healthcare interoperability, particularly with its Health Share Unified Care Record®.

In an effort to better understand where vendors are in the transition from traditional health information exchanges (HIE) to interoperability platforms, KLAS Research conducted interviews with healthcare organisations that were identified by their vendors as their most advanced users. For purposes of comparison, vendors’ broader customer bases were also surveyed for general performance feedback over the last 12 months.

The report recognised InterSystems among the top interoperability vendors for exemplary customer satisfaction as a result of the company’s flexible data delivery platform, HealthShare Unified Care Record, enabling innovative, highly custom use cases beyond population health and typical analytics. Current InterSystems customers rate their satisfaction levels with the company higher than 90 on a 100-point scale and describe InterSystems as a “true partner.”

“I needed a system that would make sense of the chaos and empower our staff to build bridges between our different systems in a scalable, reliable, and fiscally responsible way. The tool acts as a clearinghouse for data so that we aren’t building a number of legacy pipes every time we want to connect to a new system. InterSystems is very good at trying to democratise healthcare data. The platform has been open enough that we can do that, whereas most other systems can’t,” according to a HIE Director and InterSystems customer who participated in the report.

InterSystems stands among its competitive set as the easiest platform to implement and maintain, according to advanced customers of its HealthShare Unified Care Record. The majority of respondents reported speed to value of only six to 12 months.

“The KLAS Research report is evidence of our commitment to our customers,” said Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare for InterSystems. “Every organisation has different needs and goals for an interoperability platform, and we pride ourselves on our ability to customise our platform to meet those specifications, all while making the implementation experience seamless. We are thrilled with the results of this year’s report as it validates the work we do to help our customers meet patients’ needs.”

The KLAS Interoperability Platforms 2019 report is based on the cumulation of thousands of interviews among healthcare professionals and their thoughts around the IT products and services their organisations use. Interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation sharing the scores and commentary collected online, so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from peer reviews.

About InterSystems
InterSystems is the information engine that powers some of the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, business, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 80 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.intersystems.com/.

About KLAS
KLAS is a data-driven company on a mission to improve the world’s healthcare by enabling provider and payer voices to be heard and counted. Working with thousands of healthcare professionals, KLAS collects insights on software, services and medical equipment to deliver reports, trending data and statistical overviews. KLAS data is accurate, honest and impartial. The research directly reflects the voice of healthcare professionals and acts as a catalyst for improving vendor performance. To learn more about KLAS and the insights we provide, visit https://klasresearch.com/.

Freudenberg Medical, a global developer and manufacturer of medical devices, components, and minimally invasive solutions, has developed a ground-breaking new technology to continuously measure the inner geometry of silicone tubes. The new technology significantly increases product quality for high precision applications, such as pacemaker lead insulation, and dramatically cuts down on material usage and process time.

Freudenberg’s innovative measurement system is called Helix iMC™ and it stands for inner measurement and control. The technology is unique to the medical device market and is specifically designed for medical silicone extrusion. Helix iMC uses sensor technology to continuously measure the inner geometry of extruded products such as single- or multi-lumen IDs, wall thickness, or concentricity as an inline process.

“Until now, it was not possible to measure the ID of silicone tubing without making manual cuts at various cross sections, usually an off-line process,“ said Dr. Max Kley, President of Freudenberg Medical. “Now with our innovative Helix iMC technology, we offer customers more efficiency – better control, continuous processing, and less scrap – for an overall increase in quality and a significant cost savings.“

Customers benefit from continuous data monitoring across a complete production run without interruption and sample cuts, resulting in reduced validation time in order to get new products to market faster. For critical medical devices it is highly beneficial to 100% control and document every critical dimension throughout an entire production run and not only on a sample basis.

About Freudenberg Medical

Freudenberg Medical is a global partner for the design, development and manufacture of innovative medical devices, components, and product solutions. With 11 manufacturing operations and more than 1,500 associates worldwide, Freudenberg Medical offers a wide range of capabilities from high precision silicone and thermoplastics components and tubing to coatings, hypotubes, and subassemblies for catheters and minimally invasive devices. www.freudenbergmedical.de

Proximo Medical, LLC announced a partnership with PEDRA™ Technology, a Singapore based medical device innovator focused on the treatment of peripheral artery disease (PAD), for marketing and commercialization of its perfusion monitoring technology.

Proximo Medical is a fractional commercial organization for start-up medical device technologies and international medical device companies wishing to enter the U.S. market. The company provides market validation, an experienced national sales team and scalability to deliver patients and physicians the best care in a cost-effective model.

“Physicians and their industry partners have directed significant resources to determining the optimal treatment for patients with PAD, be it a balloon, a stent or another treatment. Far less time has been spent asking the question “Has the treatment I have chosen for this individual patient really improved outcomes”? The reason for this was that we did not have an easy-to-use, real-time method for assessing the quality of the intervention. PEDRA Technology has developed a new device that could possibly revolutionize the management of patients with PAD,” states Paul Hayes, vascular surgeon, Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and lead investigator of the first-in-man study of the technology.

The development of PEDRA Technology’s perfusion monitoring system is intended to give physicians real-time feedback to enhance decision-making in the angiography suite, providing clinicians with the data to determine the appropriate treatment path. The product is not available for sale in the U.S.

“As a medical device innovator located outside of the U.S., with a product in prototype development, there are significant challenges navigating the U.S. clinical and regulatory system and developing the appropriate commercialization strategy,” states Kareen Looi, CEO, PEDRA Technology. “We are pleased to partner with Proximo Medical, and to work with their marketing and sales team, proven professionals in the vascular space. This relationship will advance our ability to establish the PEDRA Technology monitoring system as an essential PAD treatment tool, one that augments angiographic guidance, improves patient care and reduces the cost burden on the health care system.”

Early indications in a single-center observational study in Cambridge, United Kingdom demonstrate that PEDRA Technology’s monitoring system is able to provide real-time perfusion feedback in correlation with interventional procedures, and is an easy fit into the angio suite workflow. The system projects a quantitative signal of foot tissue perfusion, with early data pointing to a potential intra-procedural perfusion target for positive patient outcomes.

“Proximo Medical is increasingly asked to help validate proof of market for international organizations entering the U.S. The system can be complicated and overseas medical device innovators are looking for a proven team to advance technologies, especially when it addresses an unmet need in the interventional suite,” states Brett Martin, CEO, Proximo Medical. “With perfusion monitoring technology, a doctor can adjust his interventional strategy in real-time, in response to a dynamic vascular environment, with the potential benefit of improving limb salvage and reducing re-admissions.”