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Independa is capping off a busy few months with two new announcements – one designed to push its home-based telecare platform further into remote and low-income areas and the other boosting its platform for senior living communities.
The San Diego-based provider of telehealth services, which late last year unveiled its Artemis platform, has now launched Health Measures, a platform combining the company’s cloud-based services with conventional telephony to assist in providing remote healthcare monitoring services to those living at home.
The company has also announced a strategic relationship with Zenith, the U.S. R&D subsidiary of LG Electronics, to deploy its Angela social engagement application – which offers video calling, messaging, reminders, games and other functions for seniors and others living at home – on LG’s Pro:Centric-enabled televisions, designed specifically for communities serving the elderly.
Reaching out to remote communities Health Measures is designed for people living in rural areas with poor cellular coverage, as well as those with limited funds and those without the time to implement a wireless health monitoring solution immediately after leaving the hospital. Biometric data, such as weight, blood pressure, blood-glucose readings, temperature and pulse and heart rate, is entered on a conventional or mobile phone, after which it is converted to digital and entered into the company’s cloud-based telecare solution.
“We have designed Health Measures to help mitigate expensive and often debilitating conditions that commonly arise during transitions in care,” said Independa CEO Kian Saneii in a press release. “Our new service will enable hospitals, other caregiving organizations and family caregivers to begin monitoring a care recipient’s biotelemetry as soon as the person returns to their residence. Professional and family caregivers will receive timely information, avoiding the need for time-consuming and costly routine home visits.”
“Health Measures offers a convenient, intuitive way to provide better, more cost-effective care for elderly people who need remote observation but whose residences don’t have the technological infrastructure for sophisticated wireless health monitoring solutions,” said Richard Della Penna, Independa’s chief medical officer and a former Kaiser Permanente national eldercare lead, in the press release. “Considering that most conditions requiring a return to the hospital emerge in the first three days after discharge, Health Measures provides hospitals and other healthcare organizations new opportunities to avoid readmissions and related Medicare and Medicaid penalties.”
Like the Artemis platform, which uses wireless devices, cellular and broadband services to capture and transmit data, Health Measures data can be displayed on the company’s Caregiver Web App, which enables caregivers to monitor homebound patients and deliver automatic reminders.
Company officials plan to introduce Health Measures in February, after a month of pilot testing.
Another channel for Angela The Independa-LG deal, announced at this week’s International CES show in Las Vegas, pushes the company’s Angela platform ¬– which was unveiled last year – into senior living communities and other assisted-living settings.
Described as “the next Wii or iPad for the golden generation” and running off an off-the-shelf touch-screen tablet, Angela offers secure, one-touch access to a variety of interactive content, including the Internet, Facebook, games and puzzles, video chat and e-mail. It’s fully integrated with Smart Reminders (which the company launched last January), which allows caregivers to set up automatic reminders for care receivers to take medications, keep medical and social appointments and record “Life Stories.”
Angela also sends visual notifications to existing telephone alerts as options for receiving reminders, as well as confirmation to caregivers that reminders have been acknowledged and confirmed, closing a daily communication loop for medication compliance.
“As the leading commercial television vendor in the U.S. healthcare and hospitality markets, LG Electronics is the ideal partner for extending Angela to senior living and long-term care facilities,” said Saneii in a separate press release. “This strategic alliance complements Independa’s core technology and strengthens our market penetration, brand recognition, product excellence and industry relationships, all of which are key as we serve the expanding elderly population.”
“Working with Independa provides a powerful new opportunity for adding value to LG commercial TVs for the large and rapidly growing eldercare market,” added LG’s Richard M. Lewis, Zenith’s senior vice president of technology and research. “With Independa, we are planning to provide seniors, their loved ones and their professional caregivers an industry-first suite of multimedia services for staying in touch and active.”
Independa officials say they will conduct customer trials of the new offering and collaborate with LG on marketing and development support before deploying to long-term care facilities.
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