UCI Health, the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine, is laying the groundwork for a virtual care platform for remote patient monitoring (RPM) and hospital-at-home initiatives, working with digital therapeutics company Biofourmis.
The Orange County-based medical center is a 459-bed acute care hospital providing tertiary and quaternary care, ambulatory and specialty medical, behavioral health and rehabilitation services.
Boston-based Biofourmis’ RPM platform will replace UCI Health’s legacy remote patient monitoring system and continue monitoring appropriate patients after their discharge.
“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, in a statement. “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 analyzed through the Biofourmis AI algorithms. The AI establishes a personalized patient baseline using data collected from wearable biosensors and electronic patient-reported outcomes, according to the company. When the baseline is compared against population-level data, the AI creates a real-time, reliable view of disease trajectory. Machine-learning capabilities alert clinicians to opportunities that optimize 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, founder and CEO of Biofourmis., in a statement. “As this care virtualization initiative grows within the health system, the Biofourmis platform can be easily scaled and customized to enable UCI Health’s clinicians across numerous specialties to deliver exceptional care independent of a patient’s physical location.”
