Minority Report for Fall Detection

Monitoring in the Medical Home

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist#TheIncrementalist

On this episode I spoke to Tom Hale, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer at VirtuSense a company providing monitoring in healthcare settings for automated fall detection and is now adding biometrics sensors for broader insights and opportunities for intervention in the medical home. Tom’s early work found him heading up Mercy Medical group and helping steer the organization and physicians through the new era of managed care and implementing EMR and speech recognition technology.

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We talk about the value technology brings to healthcare and the importance of data and relationships that must be in place for the technology to work so it can augment the practice of medicine. He was involved in the early success of telemedicine and virtual care at Mercy Health and launched the world’s first virtual care center.

We discuss the challenges in our current fee for service system and how some of the newer plans such as Medicare Advantage, ACO’s and MSSP’s are starting to improve the healthcare system all being accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic.

Technology is now offering new capabilities to solve problems in healthcare with VirtuSense systems taking data from LIDAR sensors in patients rooms and using algorithms processes large amounts of data to turn this into timely insights that can tell when a patient gets up or gets out of their bed or chair alerting staff 30-60 seconds beforehand, so they can meet the patient rather than finding them on the floor. This one problem alone costs Medicare $52 Billion each year.

Listen in to hear him talk about “Hales Economics” and where this technology is headed and the exciting addition of other sensors and more data and biometrics that can now be sent home with the patient offering reliable monitoring at home.

About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.