KORE has teamed up with California-based Myia Health, an enterprise platform for healthcare delivery in the home, to provide hospitals with software and IoT managed services.

The goal is to ensure IoT devices are kitted and shipped to patients who are being treated where they live.

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of digital transformations in all industries, especially in the healthcare sector.

“The connected health segment has experienced 18 years’ worth of innovation and IoT adoption during the 18 months of the pandemic,” said KORE CEO Romil Bahl. “And the pace isn’t slowing down. Virtual patient care and remote patient monitoring have become the go-forward norm in part because IoT has matured, and we can service this demand with our one-stop-shop IoT enablement services.”

Powered by data analytics, Myia’s platform connects clinical actions with patient outcomes and identifies patients with the greatest need for high-touch care. When a patient is identified as vulnerable in a population or upon discharge from the hospital, KORE and Myia collaborate to handle the device logistics and deploy Myia’s patient and clinician software technology that allows healthcare providers to manage patients’ health in a continuous and preventative manner from the home.

Hospitals have consistently encountered the same significant logistics hurdles, though, as they attempt to build their virtual care and virtual hospital strategies. The virtual care experience is possible because of the advancement in market-ready health monitoring devices and improved choice in and reliability of the required connectivity for those devices.

Take, for example, a hospital in the mid-western part of the USA. It typically adds 5000 remote patients annually, and each of those patients has on average three health monitoring devices.

Before leveraging KORE, this hospital was handling the sourcing and logistics for 15,000 devices that were out in the field. The hospital quickly realised that it made more sense to outsource these services to a third party to manage the sourcing, servicing, kitting and retrieval of those devices.

“Hospitals prefer to stick to their knitting and focus on giving care, not the details of ensuring a heart monitor device has arrived at the home of the patient and will work out of the box, including connectivity and secure flow of data,” Bahl said.

Myia CEO Simon MacGibbon added: “Myia utilises its advanced analytics and machine learning to partner with major hospital systems to provide the digital infrastructure of their virtual operations, which fuels and optimises patient outcomes, clinical operations and the economics of these state-of-the-art virtual command centres where many thousands of patients can be monitored and preventatively managed in near-real time. KORE plays a fundamental role in the success of these endeavours because it handles all of the managed services and logistics of making sure the right devices are delivered to the right patients at the right time.”

With a chronic heart failure patient, for example, KORE kitting and logistics capabilities are critical to ensure the cellular connected sensors and tablet arrive at the home of the patient with the proper software and configuration. KORE integrates sensors that capture vital health stats such as blood pressure and oxygen levels along with temperature and patient weight. Testing ensures a flawless out-of-the-box experience at a most critical point in the patient’s recovery process.

“The ultimate outcome is that we’re helping keep people healthy after an acute event so that they don’t have to go back to the hospital and are as well-managed and healthy as possible,” MacGibbon said. “This ultimately will help improve patient outcomes, and drive down overall healthcare costs and utilisation.”

As hospitals move into the new norm of virtual care, they are no longer just hospital caregivers. The hospitals now have a highly complex, home-based logistics piece of their business that they have never before encountered. AI, technology and specialised managed services are enabling hospitals to make their visions for virtual care a reality, as effectively as possible, while ensuring the behind-the-scenes processes are as streamlined and cost-efficient as possible.