Doctella
Democratizing Remote Monitoring

The value-based payment model in the healthcare landscape has encouraged the public and private healthcare providers to focus on providing quality care. While remotely monitoring patients remains a key part of better care delivery, the exorbitant cost of Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) has put both the practitioners and the patients on the back foot. Founded by experts in clinical science and technologists in Silicon Valley, Doctella offers feature-rich, end-to-end application for medical practitioners to offer cloud-based RPM services to patients. Designed with a focus on Medicare’s requirements and specifications, “Doctella allows the provider to offer a simple and economical RPM that can be used to receive reimbursement for the recently unbundled CPT code 99091,” says Amer Haider, CEO and co-founder of Doctella.

Being intuitive, interactive, secure, and HIPAA-compliant, Doctella’s cloud-based RPM proves advantageous for both the hospitals and patients. The Doctella app monitors the patient's physiological and non-physiological vitals such as heart rate, blood pressure, the number of steps walked, and duration of sleep through wearable devices. Being device-agnostic, Doctella’s web interface and native iOS/Android app can be used to capture physiological vitals, automatically or manually (in the absence of connected devices). When the vitals cross a physician-prescribed threshold value, Doctella alerts the patient/caregiver, and asks the patient about relevant symptoms. In case the patient-reported symptoms point to health concerns, the patient/caregiver is instructed on remedial steps. Optionally the healthcare team can be notified through simple yet comprehensive reports about the patient’s vitals, enabling the healthcare team to intervene before the patient’s condition worsens. “The app has the ability to perform as a standalone service or be integrated with EHRs through the Epic App Orchard or SMART on FHIR apps,” says Asif Ahmed, Head of Business Development and EHR Integration and Analytics, Doctella. Apart from remotely monitored vitals, healthcare teams get visibility into health trends, compliance, education, and patient engagement, allowing them to improve care and reduce healthcare costs. Doctella also supports the collating of medical-grade data through the cloud and IoT gateways. With these capabilities, healthcare providers can achieve reduced hospital readmissions, ER visits, increased HCAHPS, improved medication compliance, increased reimbursement, and enhanced productivity.

In addition, Doctella empowers hospitals, practitioners, and other healthcare service providers to personalize their own versions of the RPM app, which patients can download and readily use. The company provides an app studio with a user-friendly editor enabling the healthcare team to configure the app based on their branding, vital thresholds, FAQs, and to-dos for the patients. The presence of a large number of CareProgram templates makes the creation of a customized RPM app, easy, and fast.

One of Doctella’s users is Sibley Memorial Hospital, Johns Hopkins. The hospital’s discharge unit wanted to call and stay in touch with patients discharged to home to reduce readmission and improve the CAHPS scores and patient experience. Sibley Hospital is using Doctella to achieve these goals. After implementing Doctella, an invitation was sent to patients to install the app. The case coordinator follows up on patients with self-reported issues. Owing to the remote instructions and assessments, the coordinator was able to contact 57 percent of the selected discharge group automatically with no effort. Typically 10 percent of patients self-reported issues that gave the nursing staff a priority of list of patients that needed a call. This saved 6-9 hours for every 100 patients discharge records and improved patient satisfaction.

Doctella allows the provider to offer a simple and economical RPM that can be used to fulfill requirements for CPT Code 99091

Haider aims for a widespread implementation of RPM to make sure patients are on track with their health across the continuum of care. Presently holding a license with Johns Hopkins University, Doctella is deployed at multiple hospitals and is expected to be widely implemented across regions in the months ahead.