Looking to deliver a higher level of care in the home, Always Best Care Senior Services has begun leveraging remote patient monitoring (RPM).
The initiative reflects how non-medical home care organizations are becoming more tech-savvy to keep clients healthy while winning new referral business.
“We thought that remote patient monitoring would give us a better opportunity to provide 24/7 oversight to our clients and their loved ones, especially for those that are transitioning out of the hospital,” Jake Brown, president and CEO of Always Best Care, told Home Health Care News. “Whether we’re in the home or not, an RPM solution provides another layer of care.”
Roseville, California-based Always Best Care is a home care franchise company that operates across 224 territories in 30 states and Canada.
As of December, Always Best Care had begun rolling out its RPM solutions across its entire franchise system. The company’s aim is to give seniors access to the real-time monitoring of vital statistics to, in turn, lower hospital readmission or trips to the emergency room.
The RPM solution works by monitoring a patient’s vital statistics, such as blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, oxygen levels and more. It delivers these vital statistics to health care providers through the cloud. The solution also includes a 24/7 clinical call center that monitors seniors’ vital signs and intervenes on their behalf.
In order to do this, the franchise company formed a partnership with RPM and personal safety technologies and services provider Anelto.
“[Anelto] captured our imagination because we felt it had a fairly all-inclusive solution,” Brown said. “[Seniors] can very easily engage with the system and understand what’s going on for them, as well as communicate.”
In general, finding an RPM or telehealth partner can be a daunting task for home-based care providers.
“There are so many different providers out there, … and almost none of them do it all the same way,” Brown said. “It’s a very fragmented opportunity. We saw all these things bombarding us.”
Aside from adding another layer of care, employing RPM allows Always Best Care to work around the challenges of the COVID-19 emergency.
“The COVID situation over the past couple of years has caused so much uncertainty in the minds of our seniors,” Brown said. “I think COVID-19 triggered a higher level of concern about health. We wanted to be able to offer seniors something so that they could feel secure in their homes.”
Offering this RPM solution is a move that puts Always Best Care ahead of the curve, according to Brown.
“We believe it differentiates us from our competition,” he said. “It’s a solution that allows for a higher level of care to our clients. We do expect that we will see others following in some manners as well.”
Ultimately, Brown sees the value of investing in RPM. While return on investment (ROI) is important to Always Best Care, Brown stressed that the importance of investing in RPM goes beyond this.
“You’ve got to almost look beyond the dollars,” he said. “It’s a long-term strategy that’s necessary. Even if you can’t perfectly measure the ROI, it’s a long-term strategy that says we want to be able to ensure a better quality of life and better care for the seniors we take care of.”
Additional reporting by Robert Holly
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