Scottsdale, AZ, May 9, 2022— Life365, CareHalo and Tuzag, leaders in Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), Virtual Care and Patient Engagement, announced today the alignment of the companies to work together to provide a full suite of services, on one platform, which enables physicians to bill for Chronic Care (CCM), RPM, and Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM) services, while facilitating transition of care from hospital to home.
The introduction of Medicare reimbursement codes has driven increased physician adoption of RPM solutions as a means to extend services to greater populations of patients, while improving the economic bottom line to their practices. Consumers are demanding different approaches in how they personally engage in their own healthcare, meanwhile professional care resources are still being stretched thin with increasing patient loads and decreasing number of healthcare resources. Telehealth adoption accelerated during the recent pandemic as a means for care professionals to address rising patient caseloads and simultaneously minimizing in-person patient-clinician contact and unnecessary exposure to / and spread of the virus. RPM services have taken a foothold in the health system as a complement to Telehealth, since reimbursement codes have been put in place to compensate physicians for taking care of patients outside of the traditional point of care. The next step is to make these services more widely available, scalable, and easy to adopt.
“We have found that when we bring an RPM solution into a Physician’s office, we need to do about 90% of the work to help stand up a program that will maximize patient engagement and take some of the critical work load off the physician’s hands”, said Tamika Goins, CEO of CareHalo. We realized for RPM to be adopted, our solution had to be turnkey and provide full-service – beginning with stratifying and enrolling patients, distributing kitted solutions to patients, and integrating to clinical backend data systems. After that we need to address patient engagement to take their vitals, remotely monitoring the patient generated data, and alerting the primary care physician for potential intervention. In addition, Providers also need help with appropriate Billing for these services. In order for a Physician to bill some RPM codes, they needed to have at least 16 days of readings and that required our monitoring centers to regularly engage the Physician’s patients to maximize adherence. Our efforts help improve patient health outcomes, increase program retention, and drive higher practice profitability.”
“CMS is helping drive changes to major healthcare models – with transitional care of patients from hospital to home for recovery”, said Dicks, CEO of Life365. “To support this change model, providers need to replicate the hospital room at home, providing care along with safety, security – it takes much more than just collecting vital signs in a remote location. RPM is an important component, but Personal Emergency Response (PERS) plays an equally valuable role when they are combined together to ensure that the home is safe and has the appropriate resources to transition care to home”, said Dicks. “As this team works together, we’re aligning with major PERS companies to bring PERS+RPM into the home – to enable this evolving Trillion $ Hospital@Home market.”
“One key ingredient that often gets overlooked in transitional care is the engagement of the patient, which leads to greater adherence and improvement in the patient’s health, which yields lower costs and greater reimbursement”, said Neal Sofian, CEO of Tuzag. “Tuzag has designed omnichannel engagement delivered across most communication channels to work in the background to “nudge” patients into adherence and promote engagement in their own care”, said Sofian.
Leadership in the three companies believe their combination of services, along with their partners, positions them well to become a top Virtual Care Platform, enabling new models of care, improving health outcomes, and meeting consumer demand to receive care at home.
About Life365
The Life365 Virtual Care platform integrates health systems with healthcare solution / service providers and logistics companies to deliver a one-stop, integrated platform for engaging growing patient populations at home and beyond. The platform is integrated to over 400+ medical devices – with multiple software and hardware options for connecting to patients at home. Life365 is the only Virtual Care Platform integrated to the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which serves over 300 health systems and hospitals. Life365 is headed by an experienced, industry recognized team, recently receiving a 2021 Silver Edison Award for their work utilizing remote care solutions to address COVID-19.
For more information regarding Life365, please visit www.life365.health.
About CareHalo
CareHalo is the leading health monitoring service, transforming remote patient monitoring and chronic care management by providing a service pathway to collaborative care on demand - with a focus on 24/7 clinical support to ease the chronic disease management and remote patient monitoring burden on payers, hospitals, providers, home health, care givers and patients. CareHalo’s services can be integrated with any remote patient monitoring technology platform and customizable to meet the unique needs of the patient populations. The company’s providers include internist, specialist, nurse practitioners, dietitians and medical assistants - all acutely focused on driving improved health incomes and better quality of life for its members. CareHalo's services drive results in improving health outcomes and driving down the cost of care.
For more information about CareHalo, visit www.carehalo.com.
About Tuzag
Tuzag assists healthcare clients to increase customer engagement, by creating virtual well-being assistants adept at relationship building, accelerating adoption of desired behaviors, and helping clients optimize their customers' experiences. The tuzagInside solution marries conversational AI, hyper-personalized content development, and behavioral science to help grow scalable digital interactive relationships, through a cost effective, easy to integrate, omni channel platform. The Tuzag virtual assistant helps participants optimize quality of life. We'll also be licensing self-service access to tuzagTCS, Tuzag’s integrated tailored messaging design and development environment.
For more information about Tuzag, visit www.wearetuzag.com.