AI Hospital at Home Market Map: Giving operations and patient experience an upgrade
This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
Hospitals are increasingly using “virtual nurse” technologies to extend the impact of their staff and fix care gaps for inpatient treatment (covered in last week’s Briefing). But the more common application of this software is to extend medical services into the home, allowing patients to receive care in the setting they are most comfortable in.
Care In Your Own Bed
Our AI hospital at home category covers a set of products designed to extend the reach of clinicians beyond the facility. The tools take in constant data from remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices, uploading it directly into the EHR so clinicians can monitor conditions from afar. Nurses can check the vitals for dozens of patients at once, flagging any deterioration early on and proactively sending care so patients avoid trips to the emergency room.
These systems aim to improve hospital operations and patient experience across the patient’s journey, enabling early discharge (so hospitals can give beds to those who need them) and limiting readmissions. Many of the vendors in this segment even help hospitals with triage, bringing in outside teams of clinical professionals who do the first stages of monitoring and escalation, working as a 24/7 front line to solve urgent situations.
Getting The Tech Right
The hardest aspect of these systems is gathering the data accurately. In an inpatient setting, a trained professional will be operating the device. In the home, this is often an untrained relative or the patient themselves. Early RPM devices, which depended on user-input data, often suffered from usability issues, prompting unreliable data and false positives that made medical professionals wary of trusting what was coming in.
Platforms are evolving to tackle this concern by requiring less and less of the patient. The devices are increasingly simple, wireless wearables that take in data continuously. Sensorum is one example of a company taking this a step further and installing monitoring devices in the home to detect issues—as the computer vision technologies improve, data reliability will too.
Finding The Right Vendor
Key considerations for this segment include:
Interoperability: Some vendors ship their own devices, while others integrate across a host of existing RPM tools.
Customization: Vendors vary in how much they customize the clinical pathway to the partner they are working with. Some will specialize in different niches, often chronic or high-acuity conditions.
Cybersecurity: Given the amount of data flowing through these systems, especially with the rise in ambient monitoring, safety is paramount.
Clinical Support: Some vendors are mostly EHR-integrated dashboards; others will do direct triaging and even send their own nurses to resolve care situations directly at the home.
Some of the vendors that we’ve seen operating in this space include Biofourmis, Cadence, CareSimple, CloudDX, Current Health, Datos Health, Health Recovery Solutions, HealthArc, Medically Home, NSight Health, PrimeFocus Health, Reimagine Care, Rimidi, Sensorum, ThinkAndor, Vivalink, and Vivify Health.
From our perspective, the most interesting question in this category is how simple vendors can make data collection. The tools to analyze the incoming data are rapidly improving with developments in artificial intelligence, but the “garbage in, garbage out” rule of models will apply until data collection is reliable.