Page 23 - HME Business, March 2018

OXYGEN CARE:
Getting the Whole Picture
Remote patient monitoring has taken hold in respiratory care, and there’s a strong business case for oxygen providers to get in on the trend sooner, rather than later. What do they need to know?
By David Kopf
To convey the scale and ubiquity of remote patient monitoring in both global and U.S. health- care, let’s looks at some recent market data: At the outset of 2017, sleep therapy equipment manufac- turer ResMed reported that 1 billion nights of sleep data had been downloaded using its AirView remote patient monitoring platform. That’s just one vendor. Factor in all the CPAP makers, and you can quickly get an impression of the scale involved with only the sleep segment of remote monitoring.
Globally, the number of remotely monitored patients grew by 51 percent to 4.9 million during 2015, according to researchers Berg Insight. Looking ahead, Berg reports the number of remotely monitored patients will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 48.9 percent to reach 36.1 million by 2020.
Where HME is concerned, connected medical devices, such as sleep therapy equipment, accounted for a whopping 71 percent of total remote patient monitoring revenues in 2015, according to Berg. And again, that’s just 2015.
Now the trend has come to oxygen with solid investment from the oxygen equipment manufac- turers. The rst foray into remote POC monitoring came when O2 Concepts worked with Verizon roughly three years ago to introduce the Oxlife Independence with DNA Technology. That rst step was a device that was largely founded on the concept of eet management: providers would remotely monitor POCs to ensure they were being used and that they were functioning properly. But that soon gave way to monitoring usage, and thusly patients.
Since that rst stab at remote POC monitoring, we’ve seen other products enter the market. Two recent innovations include Invacare Corp.’s Platinum Mobile Oxygen Concentrator with Connectivity, and CAIRE Inc.’s CAIREview remote monitoring system, which is currently used on its Companion
5 stationary oxygen concentrator, and will soon be integrated into its Eclipse 5 POC
Here to Stay
“I see this trend as de nitely something that has staying power,” says Dan Van Hise, vice president
of marketing for the Biomedical Division at Chart Industries Inc. “... There’s a growing desire \[among HMEs\] to have a connected solution to network their devices back to their headquarters, so they can have some surveillance of the technology that they have, but also to share that with their referral sources. Even the ability for the clinicians that they may have
ome oxygen equipment has experienced tremendous technical advancement in recent years, and that innovation has dramatically altered how many respiratory businesses provision their services and work with referral partners. Obviously, we’re talking about portable oxygen solutions which have allowed providers to not only adapt to major reimbursement changes, such as the 36-month
rental cap and competitive bidding, but have also helped them to provide more effective care.
Well hang on to your hat, because another trend is about to further revolutionize home oxygen care:
remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring is a capability well known and long enjoyed to providers of sleep therapy and diabetes care solutions. In a remote patient monitoring care continuum, the care devices — PAP devices and glucometers, in this case — can monitor patient performance and feed that data back to care management systems that physicians can use to see unique health events and tweak care. Those devices can also connect with personal apps that patients use to better manage their own care.
In an outcomes-oriented reimbursement environment, remote monitoring becomes indispensable because it allows those referral partners to work with HME providers and patients to optimize outcomes. This is not only good for the patient, but ensure that the physician and provider is reimbursed.
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“I see this trend as de nitely something that has staying power.”
— Dan Van Hise, Chart Industries Inc.