Biofourmis, a Boston-based global leader in virtual care and digital therapeutics, announced that it was selected by Blessing Health System in Quincy, Ill., as the technology solutions partner for its newest program, which delivers acute-level hospital care inside patients’ homes.
Blessing Health System is an integrated rural health system spread over three states (Illinois, Missouri and Iowa) consisting of three hospitals, two physician groups, an accredited college of nursing and health sciences, a network of medical specialty businesses and a charitable foundation.
Biofourmis is supporting the health system with its turnkey, end-to-end, home hospital solution for participation in the Rural Home Hospital project. This new program allows caregivers to deliver hospital-level care in patients’ homes across a range of acute conditions instead of admitting them to a medical facility. This allows them to optimize capacity and ensure that hospital beds are available for more critically ill patients. Other outcomes include higher patient satisfaction, lower readmission rates and hospital-acquired conditions, as well as a reduction in the overall cost of care. For rural communities, home hospital programs also reduce patient and family travel burdens and out-of-pocket costs associated with facility-based care.
Blessing Health System providers will visit patients in their homes and utilize Biofourmis technology to remotely monitor them using biosensors and a patient-centric companion app. Continuously streaming data from the wearables and electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) are fed into the Biofourmis artificial-intelligence (AI)-powered Biovitals® Analytics Engine, which establishes a personalized patient baseline via machine learning and delivers real-time notifications to providers as patient conditions change.
“Participating in a home-based hospital program in our rural area required choosing an experienced and knowledgeable technology partner offering a comprehensive solution that we could easily expand as the initiatives added more patients and more conditions,” said Mary Frances Barthel, MD, MHCM, SFHM, FACP, Chief Quality and Safety Officer, Blessing Health System. “Although we considered several solutions, Biofourmis offered the most comprehensive, highly scalable and user-friendly solution. We are confident that it will enable us to successfully participate in this program, but more importantly, deliver the high-quality care that our patients expect in the comfort and convenience of their homes.”
Biofourmis has deep experience as a technology provider for hospital-level care at home, including the Home Hospital program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which co-developed Biofourmis’ Hospital@Home technology solution. Brigham’s clinical leadership has published several clinical studies demonstrating the benefits of its program, including a randomized clinical trial in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found the Home Hospital program reduced hospital admissions among participating patients by 70% and lowered costs by 40%.
Rural Health System of the Future
To date, most home hospital programs serve primarily urban areas. Over the next three years, the Rural Home Hospital project will apply lessons and processes learned from those earlier initiatives to help build, launch and evaluate a nationwide program to serve the unique care needs of rural residents across the U.S.
The Rural Home Hospital was created by a joint venture of the Harvard T. J. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts. Blessing Health System was one of only two U.S. participants selected out of a pool of 700 applicants. Rural Home Hospital will include patients with acute exacerbations of conditions such as heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, gout, chronic kidney disease and others. For the research study, roughly half of the participants will receive facility-based inpatient care and the other half will receive home-based care.
Blessing Health System is also one of 92 health systems in the nation to receive the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver, with 204 hospitals in 34 states participating (as of March 17). The Acute Hospital Care at Home Program provides 1:1 Medicare reimbursement parity for hospitals that admit patients with a wide range of acute conditions to their homes. As with the Rural Home Hospital project, patients receive a combination of in-person and virtual visits from providers, as well as around-the-clock monitoring and communication.
“Health systems in every type of community in the U.S. are recognizing the clinical and economic benefits of safely and effectively delivering more care in the home, whether that is acute, post-acute or complex chronic condition management,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO and founder of Biofourmis. “Blessing Health System serves a large geographic region, but by partnering with Biofourmis, together we will ensure that providers have the actionable data and tools to deliver highly personalized care regardless of where patients are located.”
