When you live with a chronic health condition, it can feel like a cloud is constantly hanging over you. Chronic conditions don’t take the day off. People with chronic health issues can easily start to feel more like a patient than a person.
Managing a chronic health condition abounds with challenges: daily medicine, tests and injections, constant doctor visits, even regular hospitalizations. According to one startling statistic, 1 out of 2 people with chronic conditions fail to stick to their prescribed treatment plans, a fact that leads to 100,000 preventable deaths and $100 billion in preventable costs every year.
How might clinicians stop complications in their tracks, before patients require hospitalization? How can they provide ongoing support that can help reduce readmissions and improve overall outcomes? Lenovo’s Virtual Care solution just might hold the answers.
With Lenovo Virtual Care, patients will never be alone. The HIPAA-compliant system, which is configured to protect patient security and privacy, enables clinicians to provide ongoing, targeted care for a range of conditions, including diabetes, COPD, congestive heart failure and hypertension.
For a monthly per-patient service fee, clinicians give their patients a customizable in-home technology kit that includes the hardware, software and biometric devices required for everyday virtual patient management between in-person visits. The patient logs into the portal and is guided through each step by the AI-enabled virtual assistant, powered by Lenovo. As prompted by the assistant, patients can manage their health data and take their own vitals, which are immediately and securely transmitted to the care provider for assessment and analysis. A virtual or in-person visit is initiated as needed, and medications tweaked appropriately.
With Lenovo Virtual Care, your physician “can keep track of you not monthly, quarterly, or annually, but daily,” said Jon Pershke, VP of Lenovo Strategy and Emerging Business Development.
The support doesn’t stop there. The virtual assistant delivers the patient ongoing coaching and education on healthy habit formation. Forget to take your medication? The assistant lets you know. Need to complete a task with your clinician? The assistant has a prompt for that. This educational component is key to the patient’s progress, enabling the clinician to focus on holistically maintaining a patient’s health.
The results are already tangible. One large health care institution reported that the Virtual Care solution, developed in collaboration with Lenovo partner Vianova Health, reduced patient readmission by 18 percent. That same institution said select patients with diabetes that used the solution achieved blood-sugar targets four weeks before patients who received phone-based care.
“This is beyond traditional telemedicine,” Pershke said. “How do we focus on keeping the patient healthy versus treating them when they’re sick? Through technology, we have a solution.”