In an interesting twist, Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft’s HealthVault Grp announced a partnership this morning to address chronic disease management. The interesting twist is that Cleveland Clinic was the showcase beta customer for Google Health, which was announced by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt earlier this year at HIMSS. Like their counterpart in Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who was part of the initial Google Health public roll-out in May and who has since also established a link to HealthVault for their PatientSite users, Cleveland Clinic is taking an agnostic approach to the major platform plays with this agreement.
The Cleveland Clinic-HealthVault announcement is distinctive in that it focuses on chronic disease management, via telehealth, through use of HealthVault’s unique Connection Center. With some 50 devices from 9 vendors, the Connection Center allows the consumer to upload device data (e.g., glucose readings, heart rate, blood pressure, weight, peak flow, etc.) directly to their HealthVault account. In the Cleveland Clinic project, which began last week (Nov. 3rd), uploaded biometric data from HealthVault compliant devices will automatically be pushed to Cleveland Clinic’s EMR and subsequently exposed to the physician for patient tracking and follow-up.
Had a call this morning with Microsoft and one this afternoon with Cleveland Clinic who both shared further details on this announcement:
A target of 460 Cleveland Clinic patients will participate representing three distinct disease categories; hypertension, diabetes and heart failure. The roll-out is across the Cleveland Clinic Integrated Delivery Network (IDN) and not just hospital patients. Clearly, they are focusing on the big chronic disease categories that result in huge costs that many believe better telehealth monitoring can mitigate.
- Hypertension patients, of which there are 400, will measure blood pressure only.
- Diabetes patients, of which there will be 30, will use five devices to measure glucose, blood pressure, peakflow, pedometer and weight.
- Heart Failure patients, the remaining 30, will use four devices to measure blood pressure, peakflow, pedometer and weight.
Pilot will initially be for an extremely short 90 days. Cleveland Clinic expects to have all patients active within 4-6 weeks. Not sure what they can accomplish in 90 days, maybe Cleveland is just hedging their bets to see if patients actually comply with the prescribed measurement and upload regime. Assuming that all goes well, one can guarantee that this pilot will be extended for at least a year, if not longer, as that is the only way they will be able to provide some demonstrable results that are publishable (something that Microsoft emphasized) and ultimately may influence future legislation (e.g., CMS funding), health plan reimbursement (P4P), and broader adoption among other Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs).
Devices are being provided for free to trial participants. The only requirement, beyond the obvious willingness to diligently take their measurements, is that they have a Windows-based (XP SP2) computer and broadband access. Unfortunately, many heart disease patients are among the elderly and it is questionable as to how many have this capability. Still, the point here is to demonstrate, not solve all the problems and it is a good start.
Cleveland Clinic is training patients on the use of the devices(s), and data upload process to HealthVault, that is subsequently pushed to Cleveland Clinic’s EMR. Part of that training includes clearly notifying the patient when a particular reading should prompt a call to their doctor or even 911. Along with providing the device(s) and training, the physician will prescribe to the patient their measurement protocol (e.g., 2x/day, 3x/week, etc.) unique to that individual and the condition they are managing. Patients trust their doctors so receiving the package directly from their physician during an office visit makes a lot of sense and should encourage use and hopefully compliance. It will be interesting to see how compliant patients are to the prescribed compliance regiment as this is often a critical stumbling block. Will incentives be required?
Cleveland Clinic put in the upfront effort to understand how best to incorporate this new data stream into a physician’s workflow to minimize the burden. Specifically, the physician will receive a weekly notice notifying them that their patient(s) biometric data is ready for review. One click later and the physician is in the EMR reviewing their patient’s data for that past week. Prior to this pilot, Cleveland has experimented with other telehealth systems, but none were able to provide this level of integration with the core EMR system (always a stand-alone, silo’d operation) and thus saw little adoption among physicians. This is absolutely critical! Having spoken to many physicians about the success, and most often failure of telehealth initiatives, it nearly always circles back to lack of true integration to existing practices/workflow. Looks like this pilot tackles that issue head-on.
So what is the Business Case?
Wrapped up my conversation with Cleveland Clinic’s CIO, Dr. Martin Harris, (thanks again Martin for your time) by asking him: So what is the business case for this initiative? He outlined two areas where they see a benefit to Cleveland Clinic:
Service Case: In moving to this model of combining telehealth with traditional in-office visits they intend to completely re-design the office visit resulting in a better, more engaged and customer friendly process. This process will lead to higher customer service ratings, customer recruitment and higher customer retention – all important top-line metrics. They also see a service case for the physician as such a “system” will allow the physician to deliver a higher level of proactive care with their patients. Its all about market differentiation, distinguishing themselves in an increasingly crowded market – one that will only get more competitive.
Outcomes Case: One of the objectives of the pilot is to see if Cleveland Clinic can consistently improve the outcomes/health of its chronic care patients that will result in fewer hospital readmissions and/or complications. If all goes as planned, Cleveland Clinic believes that it will be able to use these positive results to request better reimbursement schedules (more income) from health plans. This certainly makes logical sense, but to date, health plans and CMS have been reluctant to support such programs – more of a wait and see approach. Hopefully, Cleveland Clinic will start showing some impressive results in a year or so and get those health plans on-board.
Final Note:
A couple of weeks ago I poked Microsoft about their lack of support for the telehealth consortium, the Continua Alliance. Sean Nolan responded stating a primary reason was Microsoft’s desire to move quickly (consortia always seem to move at a snail’s pace). Looks like that has paid-off as Google Health and Dossia cannot, today, support such capabilities as demonstrated above, though they are on the path having joined the Continua Alliance and Google demonstrated modest capabilities at the recent Connected for Health Symposium.
Looking ahead, we forecast 2009 to be a year of pilots which begin to demonstrate the utility of the platform model (Dossia, Google Health, & HealthVault) in support of telehealth and how telehealth technology and practices are best integrated into existing clinician workflow. Look to 2010 to see actual reimbursement models and P4P programs begin to take shape in support of promotion and adoption of telehealth.