Shortly after completing his residency, Dr. Brandon founded HouseCall MD. After some thought, he realized that there are likely elderly people who are housebound and haven’t seen a doctor in years. He realized that by making house calls, he could reduce the frequency with which these people needed to be admitted to the hospital. By contributing in this way, he was helping to reduce healthcare costs for all Americans.

Dr. William Brandon is booked up a month in advance because of his upbeat demeanor and drive.

Background

New York City’s elderly and housebound can get help from the private medical practice VisitEaseMD. Throughout the borough of Queens, New York, it is the market leader in providing these solutions.

VisitEaseMD is a service that connects patients with doctors who will come to their homes to do annual checkups, imaging, lab tests, and medication reviews. Patients usually hear about VisitEaseMD from friends and family, but some come because they were referred by a hospital or clinic.

The Need

VisitEaseMD doctors see their patients on a regular basis, once every couple of months, just like regular doctors do. While that can be useful in tracing a patient’s long-term development, it has its limitations.

Dr. William Brandon, CEO and founder of VisitEaseMD, said, “It’s hard to get enough data from those periodic visits to optimally take care of your patient and treat them as effectively as you need to.” Because “medicine is a data-driven science,” more access to high-quality data may lead to better patient outcomes.

Dr. Brandon pointed out that the information gathered during an in-person visit may not always reflect the patient’s real health. When patients know they have an appointment with their doctor, they are more likely to take their medication as directed in the days leading up to the checkup. For some, this may mean that their blood pressure returns to a healthy range. However, providers don’t always know that their patients aren’t taking their medication as prescribed, have dangerously high blood pressure, and are at high risk of having a stroke.

The Intervention

Dr. Brandon started looking for a company with experience in remote patient monitoring (RPM) to work with after realizing the limitations of the data they were gathering during their home visits. He hoped that this collaboration would provide a better picture of how VisitEaseMD’s patients are doing in terms of their health.

After considering his options, he decided to collaborate with TelevisitMD, the manufacturer of the Connect+ Home RPM Gateway, a wireless, 4G-capable device that gathers crucial patient data and transmits it to providers. Through Connect+, the VisitEaseMD team can monitor the most vulnerable patients’ vital signs every day, assess how likely it is that the patient will follow his or her medication regimen, and get in touch with the patient and their family if any results are unusual.

The patient-facing platform was one of the key differentiators Dr. Brandon cited when evaluating RPM solutions. For access to a proprietary application that measures and records their daily data, many RPM platforms require patients to have a cell phone. For patients who are elderly or unable to move around, like those the VisitEaseMD team assists, that can be a technical issue that cannot be resolved. Contrarily, Connect+ is a standalone device that can send patient data to the TelevisitMD cloud without being connected to a wireless network.

Dr. Brandon said, “That is a huge benefit for us. Due to Connect+’s ease of use, very few patients have expressed reluctance to use it. They hardly ever need to touch it once we’ve installed it in their home, and some patients might even forget it is there.

Dr. Brandon started looking for a company with experience in remote patient monitoring (RPM) to work with after realizing the limitations of the data they were gathering during their home visits. He hoped that this collaboration would give VisitEaseMD’s patients a more accurate view of their health.

After considering his options, he decided to collaborate with TelevisitMD, the manufacturer of the Connect+ Home RPM Gateway, a wireless, 4G-capable device that gathers crucial patient data and transmits it to providers. The team at VisitEaseMD can use Connect+ to regularly check the vital signs of their most vulnerable patients, determine whether or not they are likely to be taking their medications as prescribed, and get in touch with patients and their families if any unusual results are discovered.

The patient-facing platform was one of the key differentiators Dr. Brandon cited when evaluating RPM solutions. To download and use an app that measures and records their daily data, many RPM platforms require patients to have a smartphone. Particularly for elderly or immobile patients, like those the VisitEaseMD team assists, this may be a technical issue that cannot be resolved. m. Contrarily, Connect+ is a standalone device that can send patient data to the TelevisitMD cloud without being connected to a wireless network.

“For us, that is a huge advantage,” Dr. Brandon said. Due to Connect+’s ease of use, very few patients have expressed reluctance to use it. They hardly ever need to touch it once we’ve installed it in their home, and some patients might even forget it is there.

The Results

The VisitEaseMD team quickly set up a method to be notified right away if the device sent any crucial readings when they first started using the Connect+ system in 2019. A provider gets a message on their cell phone alerting them to the need to check in with a patient if any values are recorded that deviate from the patient’s predetermined normal values. The VisitEaseMD team collaborates with TelevisitMD to set these values individually because a large portion of its patients has serious and ongoing health conditions. Every week, all non-critical data is reviewed.

Dr. Brandon says, “The data we get from Connect+ is very well organized and shown in a clear way. This saves us time when we’re trying to figure out how a patient’s blood pressure, weight, or oxygen saturation levels are changing over time.” To help a patient’s family understand where their parent(s) stand regarding hypertension, we can print out a graph showing a patient’s blood pressure range over the course of the previous month, for instance.

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Brandon talked about how useful the pulse oximeter that comes with the Connect+ platform is. Some research suggests that a drop in the amount of oxygen in the blood could be an early sign of a COVID-19 infection. As a result, the VisitEaseMD team has been paying closer attention to its patients’ blood oxygen levels to determine who needs to be checked on right away and who may need to be tested for COVID-19.

The Impact

“Instead of conducting sporadic in-person evaluations, we are now continuously monitoring our patients’ vital signs, which is greatly appreciated by them, said Dr. Brandon. They also appreciate it when we call them on video when necessary using the Connect+ device. “It is so simple to dial out, speak to the patient via the Connect+ video interface, and give them instructions on what they need to do if we notice an abnormal value from one of our patients.”