Why Trinity is Shifting To 24/7 Patient Monitoring

Home health providers are quickly realizing they need to invest in tech when it comes to remote monitoring, or else they run the risk of being left behind. One home health provider has seen the industry shifting and is rolling out a remote care management platform for all patients.

Trinity Health At Home, the home health care services branch of Trinity Health, will deliver virtual home health care to patients using Vivify Health continual care technologies.

Vivify Health, based in Plano, Texas, provides remote care management platforms to the health care industry.

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Livonia, Michigan-based Trinity Health at Home provides home care and hospice to patients in Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, California, Maryland and Ohio, and will launch the program exclusively throughout Southeast Michigan before launching in other states.

“As an early adapter of remote monitoring earlier in my career, this was the clear next step for Trinity,” Erin Denholm, CEO of Trinity Health Home Services, told Home Health Care News. “Never before have we seen more people retiring. Programs like ours are going to be in higher demand because retirees are more tech-savvy than ever. Even the silent generation is interested in using technology.”

Patient-centered care has recently come more into focus, as federal payers continue to push for better patient outcomes and satisfaction. Some of the largest home health care players have also worked to shift toward patient-centered solutions.

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Expected outcomes

The program is intended to bring more of a focus to people-centered care, reduce readmission rates and prevent hospitalizations.

The data recorded on the devices will be assessed on a monthly basis.

“We have a very definitive ROI from a home care perspective and value-based perspective,” Denholm said. “This integrated model will allow for a lower number of live nursing visits in conjunction with providing remote monitoring services 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Home care nurses will have a larger case load but see their patients less.”

The technology

Trinity will be using Vivify’s Pathways +Home solution to provide each home care patient with 24/7 live remote nursing support. Each patient will be given a wireless 4G-enabled tablet configured with voice and text instructions to walk them through simple steps for monitoring and reporting education programs, according to a press release.

One component Trinity was looking for when seeking out a technology provider was a two-way video conferencing component, Denholm explained.

“All of the other vendors we looked at didn’t have an all-in-one program that included the two-way video technology, which made it rather cumbersome,” she said. “Vivify makes it more sophisticated, yet incredibly simple.”

Patients at home will essentially be able to take the device out of the box, turn it on and go. For patients discharged from the hospital, the home care nurse will help them home and assist in setting up the device, if needed.

In addition to monitoring and reporting, the wireless health devices are connected to the tablet automatically to collect patient data like weight and blood pressure.

“Vivify has created the platform on an iPad and uses extra large icons. There are even some options for handheld devices,” Denholm said.

Another perk of the program is that each patient will have the same nurse assisting them each time they initiate a video chat.

The program puts many patients at ease because they know they can call their nurse at any time of the day or night as many times as they want. There are no limits on the number of times a patient can contact a nurse, she added.

The rollout will be staggered in the coming months beyond Southeastern Michigan with the program being made available to all Trinity Health at Home patients within six months.

Written by Alana Stramowski

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