Deviceless digital health solution detects risks so care teams can intervene quickly
By Kim Ingram, R.N.
Access and communication: These are two keys to reducing costly readmissions and emergency department (ED) visits.
In a recent Newsweek article, Sumir Sahgal, M.D., founder and chief medical officer for the Bronx, New York-based Essen Health Care, highlights the challenges of access to appropriate, timely care and talks about why it’s so important for primary care physicians to build a bond with their patients.
This is especially true with medically underserved populations, he notes.
Bridging the gap with digital health
Our deviceless, AI-powered virtual care assistant, MyEleanor, can help providers reduce these costly ED visits by increasing touchpoints with patients and their primary care physicians, specialists, and other care team members in between visits. She talks to high- and rising-risk patients in a natural, conversational tone and a friendly voice about their health. She gauges severity of symptoms, triages patients and flags urgent cases so the care team can intervene.
And Eleanor doesn’t just listen to what patients say. She listens to how they say it. She can detect changes in health status from one call to the next. Changes that a patient might not think are important enough to mention, let alone a reason to call their PCP to schedule a visit during office hours.
For example, by analyzing speech and listening for keywords, Eleanor can detect if a patient is feeling dizzy. That might not seem important to the patient. But Eleanor immediately alerts the care team before that dizzy spell becomes a fall and an ED visit or hospital admission.
In one program, Eleanor detected an immediate readmission risk in 14 percent of 1,500 patients participating in a 30-day monitoring program. Those calls were elevated to the care team for rapid intervention.
Reducing cost of care
As Dr. Sahgal points out in the article, the average cost for treat-and-release care in EDs is 10-12 times higher than a visit to an urgent care clinic or a PCP office. And the number of people using the ED for urgent rather than emergency care is on the rise.
Consider, too, the cost of hiring care coordinators, nurses, or even call center employees to make calls to every at-risk patient–especially those that are hard to reach.
A five-month program that engaged about 6,300 patients saved one organization (which only had one care coordinator) 9.5 FTEs.
“A patient-focused primary/integrated care model can alleviate the challenges of limited access,” Dr. Sahgal writes. That includes urgent care and walk-in options, virtual care or deviceless digital health options such as MyndYou’s Eleanor.
Kim Ingram is MyndYou’s VP of Clinical Strategy. She has more than 30 years of clinical and digital healthcare experience, including in rural areas, where access to healthcare services is a challenge that’s being solved by digital health platforms like MyEleanor.
About MyndYou
The MyndYou team serves a higher mission to impact lives for the better. We perform our work with respect and trust, maintaining open communication, working collaboratively to solve challenges and effect rapid progress. We are a culturally diverse team committed to providing the best product experience for our customers and their patients. MyndYou does what no other platform is doing today. Our active-listening virtual care assistant, MyEleanor, extends your member reach by calling high- or rising-risk populations and triaging them using our proprietary data analytics engine. Eleanor detects subtle changes in a patient’s voice, listening not only to what they say, but also how they say it.
