Circadia Health has teamed up with more than 80 skilled nursing facilities operated by Ciena Healthcare to reduce preventable hospitalizations through remote patient monitoring.
Circadia’s C100 remote monitoring devices, which have been installed in residents’ rooms, are capable of continuously monitoring key vital signs including breathing rate, heart rate and unusual motions and comparing them with personalized profiles.
The device’s artificial intelligence-driven algorithms can alert nurses working remotely of any red flags that could indicate early warning signs of health problems such as sepsis, COPD and heart failure. Those nurses then review the alerts and decide whether to continue escalating the potential problem signs to on-site caregivers like a facility’s director of nursing. This provides a human element that keeps results efficient and accurate, said Rich Molfetta, vice president of operations at Circadia.
The firms expect that the system will be able to reduce rehospitalizations from Ciena facilities by around 25%, based on the results of past Circadia partnerships, said Fares Siddiqui, CEO and co-founder of Circadia.
“When you look at the impact of AI in nursing homes and long-term care, there’s a lot of technology that is promising results,” Siddiqui said. “There’s a difference between being theoretical and actually driving standardization and improvement in quality on a day-to-day basis.”
The monitoring systems have already been installed in 20 facilities, with plans to integrate all of Ciena’s facilities in the coming months. Empowering human care workers will be critical to the project’s success, said Amy La Fleur, senior vice president at Ciena.
“We are taking the use of AI purely from a quality improvement standpoint,” La Fleur said. “We’re not incorporating AI in terms of medical record documentation: This is really all under the umbrella of quality improvement and teaching our staff how to frame what they’re seeing.”
