Two skilled nursing facilities will soon pilot a new nursing telemedicine platform aiming to reduce unnecessary hospital trips.
This Fall, Minnesota-based Southview Acres Health Care Center and California-based Affinity Healthcare Center will test out Curve Health — an expanded successor to telemedicine startup Call9. The facilities are currently training staff to use the system to learn how to manage payments and connect on-site nurses with remote doctors.
“The Curve Health platform improves the care experience for residents and providers, while having the patient and their families at the center of everything we do,” said Curve CEO Rob MacNaughton in a statement Thursday. “Our solution is proven to enable remote physicians to collaborate with skilled nursing staff bedside to dramatically reduce unnecessary hospital transfers.”
The software platform interfaces with a set of tablets that SNF staff will be able to use to video call a remote physician and share back a video feed of the patient. The remote physician can direct the facility staff to perform tests to help diagnose a problem and staff can add patient’s family members onto the call.
A November study of six SNFs indicated that this kind of service led to only 27% of the participating residents needing transfers to local emergency departments, compared to 71% of residents studied who did not use telemedicine.
“We’re incredibly excited to roll out Curve in our facility with the hope that this becomes the norm,” Southview Acres CEO Avi Katz told SNN earlier this week.
Katz worked with Curve Health founder Timothy Peck when Peck was testing his original telemedicine platform, Call9, in 2014. Katz says the experience convinced him telemedicine was necessary in skilled nursing facilities.
Their first person who Katz saw use Call9 presented stomach problems. The man’s primary care physician on-site prescribed medicine to ease the pain, but the remote doctor staff connected via Call9 instructed staff to run an electrocardiogram (EKG) and pulled up the patient’s past EKGs in their files. With this information, the Call9 physician discovered the patient was having a heart attack but it was presenting stomach pain due to his diabetes.
“Had we kept the patient in the hospital overnight he would have died of cardiac arrest,” Katz said. “And he didn’t, he went to the hospital and got treated and he lived. That was the first time that I saw what a true telemedicine with diagnostic capability program can do for our patients.”
Curve plans to hire remote physicians to consult with residents and staff as well as a RN or EMT-trained “traffic controller” who coordinates care between remote and on-site staff, according to Garret Gleeson, the company’s head of development and communications. The company hopes this system will allow facilities to care for medically vulnerable people by helping provide 24/7 physician coverage.
The company raised $6 million in seed funding last October as it sought to build on its predecessor, Call9, which folded in 2019. Despite fundraising $34 million Call9 was forced to lay off 100 employees, citing the country’s existing billing restrictions as its downfall.
Specifically, the lack of reimbursement for telemedicine in urban nursing homes prior to 2020 was a “a stumbling block that prevented the growth of the Curve platform,” Gleeson told SNN.
But COVID-19 opened a path for Peck to try again after visitation restrictions prompted CMS to revamp its telemedicine rules to allow patients to have virtual consults with physicians as well as physical, occupational, and speech therapists. The company is named after public health experts’ urging for people to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 infections.
“The pandemic opened up a lot of people’s eyes to understanding that telemedicine is not just something that should be looked at as icing on the cake,” said Katz. “It should be part of the cake: part of our day to day fabric.”
Written by Sloane Airey
Companies featured in this article:
