A Californian academic medical centre is to deliver hospital-level care in patients’ homes and continuously monitor recently discharged patients using technology from Biofourmis, a Massachusetts-based specialist in digital therapeutics and virtual care.

The multi-year agreement with UCI Health supports continuous artificial intelligence (AI)-powered remote monitoring of acute and post-acute care patients in their homes using Biofourmis tools.

UCI Health comprises the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine, and is Orange County’s only academic health system. The medical centre is a 459-bed acute care hospital providing tertiary and quaternary care, ambulatory and specialty medical, behavioural health and rehabilitation services.

Biofourmis’ technology will enable UCI Health to establish a virtual care platform for remote patient monitoring (RPM) and hospital-at-home initiatives. Biofourmis’ RPM platform will replace UCI Health’s legacy remote patient monitoring system and continue monitoring appropriate patients after their discharge.

Post-acute RPM can help avoid hospital readmissions and, for some patients, can be an alternative to a rehabilitation centre or skilled nursing facility.

“Building on our existing operational excellence, virtual care and innovation strategies during the pandemic, we are focused on providing tools that allow our patients to recover in the comfort of their homes,” said UCI Health executive director of virtual care Susanna Rustad. “We want to simplify our patients’ journey and streamline patient progression through our hospital system to help transform care, using technology as an enabler.”

Vital signs and other biometrics will be automatically collected within UCI Health’s Epic electronic health record system and analysed through the Biofourmis AI algorithms. The AI establishes a personalised patient baseline using data collected from wearable biosensors and electronic patient-reported outcomes. When the baseline is compared with population-level data, the AI creates a real-time, reliable view of disease trajectory.

Machine-learning capabilities alert clinicians to opportunities that optimise treatment, predict decompensation, better engage patients and ultimately identify and prevent serious medical events before they occur.

“UCI Health is leading the industry in adopting more remote and virtual care models to safely care for their acute and post-acute care patients,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO of Biofourmis. “As this care virtualisation initiative grows within the health system, the Biofourmis platform can be easily scaled and customised to enable UCI Health’s clinicians across numerous specialties to deliver exceptional care independent of a patient’s physical location.”

Biofourmis has built Biovitals, a personalised AI-powered health analytics platform that predicts clinical exacerbation in advance of a critical event, which is the backbone of its digital therapeutics product pipeline across multiple therapeutic areas, including heart failure, oncology, infectious diseases such as Covid-19, chronic pain, acute coronary syndrome and COPD.

UCI Health is the primary teaching location for UCI School of Medicine. US News & World Report has recognised it as one of the USA’s best hospitals for 21 consecutive years and ranked it among the top 15 hospitals in California.