Jointly Health
Real-Time Analytics For Remote Patient Monitoring

The United States spends $2.6 trillion on healthcare annually, which accounts for 17.9 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Chronic disease, which includes heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) causes 70 percent of deaths in the U.S. and comprises approximately 75 percent of all healthcare costs. The explosion of chronic disease is not just an American phenomenon; it is the leading cause of mortality in the world, responsible for 63 percent of all deaths.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) has the potential to bend the cost curve and address chronic conditions but has not achieved widespread adoption or significant ROI to date, but this could change. On the technology front, sensors are becoming smaller, less expensive and more accessible. Wireless communication standards (such as 4G, low power blue tooth and Wi-Fi) and medical device data systems such as the Qualcomm 2net Platform's data hub allow sensors on or around patients to securely transmit data wirelessly, greatly improving patient mobility and sensor utility. Sensors are also rapidly evolving from semi-passive, singlemodal sensors that collect and send one type of physiological data once a day to passive, multi-modal sensors that collect and send a wide-variety of physiological data at high volume and velocity. Furthermore, it is now possible to remotely capture other types of data in and around the patient, including human observational, environmental (e.g. air quality), contextual and other meta data.

The big remaining challenge is capturing, organizing and analyzing these new streams of remote health data and making it actionable by healthcare professionals without negatively impacting their productivity. Jointly Health, based in San Juan Capistrano, CA and founded by Dr. Jack Kreindler, Dean Sawyer, Michael Goldsby, PhD and Frost Venture Partners, aims to solve this problem.

Jointly Health’s Remote Analytics and Monitoring Platform (RAMP) captures and removes the "noise" from a wide-variety of remote health data in near real-time. The Jointly Health RAMP also has a unique tool that permits health care professionals (without a technology background) to easily configure complex disease deterioration models that are personalized for each patient at a global level without “touching” each patient. This tool can incorporate changes in physiological data, patient and caregiver feedback and other streams of data in the model.

At the heart of the Jointly Health RAMP is a disease deterioration engine that utilizes complex event processing, signal processing, machine learning and other exponentially advancing technologies to remotely detect patient deterioration much earlier and with greater specificity. This allows healthcare professionals more opportunities to implement earlier and lower cost interventions, reducing health care costs and more importantly avoiding an unquantifiable amount of human suffering.

Jointly Health's customers are Medicare Advantage and Managed Medicaid Health Plans, Accountable Care Organizations and other healthcare organizations "at-risk" for the cost of chronic disease. Jointly Health is implementing large pilot programs with several health plans and other customers and expects to have early proof points in 2014.

Constant innovations in the remote patient monitoring area hold exciting promise for the future and because of companies like Jointly Health, remote patient monitoring is likely to become a larger part of the healthcare industry in the coming years. Berg Insight estimated that remote patient monitoring technology will grow by 26.9 percent annually between now and 2017 and this rate, 9.4 million people world-wide will be benefiting from this patient management tool.