Massachusetts-based Biofourmis is working with Imagine MIC to pioneer a collaborative remote patient monitoring model. Biofourmis’ artificial intelligence-powered RhythmAnalytics can provide clinical decision support that identifies cardiac arrhythmias and other issues requiring intervention.
 
The partnership with New York-based Imagine MIC aims to drive improved outcomes and lower healthcare costs for patients with chronic conditions. Imagine MIC is a medical device company that delivers chronic care management through remote monitoring services and HIPAA-compliant technology.
 
The first phase of the collaboration includes integrating Biofourmis’ AI-powered, FDA-cleared RhythmAnalytics with Imagine MIC’s remote management technology, which is monitored by clinicians in the Imagine MIC monitoring intervention centre in New York. RhythmAnalytics, part of Biofourmis’ Biovitals platform, uses an enhanced deep learning architecture to detect dozens of cardiac arrhythmias.
 
RhythmAnalytics will provide clinical decision support for the board-certified emergency physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and specialty-trained registered nurses in the centre who perform around-the-clock monitoring of thousands of patients with chronic conditions who are in skilled nursing facilities and sub-acute care programmes.
 
“This is a scalable partnership that is starting with cardiology, which could ultimately be applied to a number of chronic conditions and therapeutic areas in various care settings by leveraging various modules within the Biovitals platform for those applications,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO of Biofourmis.
 
By leveraging a collaborative, integrated approach to telemedicine that includes real-time streaming of hemodynamic data from a wearable sensor and two-lead ECG, the technology that Imagine MIC is based on has supported a readmission rate of only 6% for patients with congestive heart failure, compared with state and national readmission rate averages of about 27%, according to audited results from a pilot programme in New York involving more than 1000 patients over three years.
 
Imagine MIC’s wearables provide real-time data on patients’ respiratory rate, oxygen levels and heart rate; and Bluetooth streams report blood pressure, blood glucose and weight.
 
“We expect to continue improving on these already impressive outcomes by combining Imagine MIC’s newer version of the device with the power of RhythmAnalytics and the Biovitals platform,” Rajput said. “The result will be powerful clinical decision support that will enable the healthcare professionals who remotely monitor patients in the MIC to better utilise their time and skills to design interventions with on-site clinicians and focus on the highest need patients.”
 
RhythmAnalytics will support Imagine MIC’s clinicians by alerting them to more than 20 types of cardiac arrhythmias, along with beat-by-beat morphology computation that includes ventricular arrhythmias, ventricular ectopic beats and all non-paced arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation. RhythmAnalytics was trained using over four million ECG recordings collected from patients using various FDA-cleared ECG monitoring wearables.
 
“Improving cardiac outcomes and reducing care costs for the silver tsunami of seniors in the healthcare system will require a new paradigm of chronic care management that includes 24-hour chronic care management supported with proven, revolutionary technology,” said Anthony Bacchi, CEO and founder of Imagine MIC. “This collaboration is extremely synergistic, since Biofourmis’ RhythmAnalytics and Biovitals platform also have been demonstrated to deliver extraordinary results that reduce costs and improve patient outcomes.”
 
RhythmAnalytics offers an advantage in that traditional approaches to cardiac rhythm classification are prone to large false positives, leading to misdiagnosis, which can significantly increase healthcare costs. Studies also have demonstrated that the computerised arrhythmia interpretation error rates may approach 50%.
 
RhythmAnalytics supports analysis of ECGs captured from any FDA-cleared devices or wearable sensors such as Holter monitors, event recorders or other similar devices. The technology can be integrated as a cloud-based API into existing cardiac monitoring products, or directly integrated into a medical device or wearable sensor, improving the accuracy and scalability of ECG analysis and reducing rates of misinterpretation and inappropriate patient management.
 
In the future, the Imagine MIC and Biofourmis partnership will expand beyond monitoring for cardiac arrhythmias, as Imagine MIC expands its remote patient monitoring scope beyond skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and into patients’ homes. As such, additional modules from the Biovitals platform will be integrated into the Imagine MIC platform in the coming months for conditions such as heart failure, COPD and asthma to help clinicians predict adverse events, design effective interventions, collaborate with patients’ full care teams, and educate patients through their mobile devices.
 
“Although the Biovitals platform serves as a leading end-to-end digital therapeutics platform on its own, we are excited to partner with an innovative organisation such as Imagine MIC, so we can leverage our combined technologies to lower costs and improve outcomes for patients,” Rajput said. “There is a tremendous need in the market for our combined solutions to help reduce the burden on clinicians in managing the multiple chronic conditions of people living in SNFs and other care settings. We look forward to working with Imagine MIC to support high-quality care delivered through around-the-clock monitoring and advanced AI-driven predictive analytics for clinical decision support that will result in earlier interventions that lead to better outcomes.”