ResMed shares the wealth (of data)

SAN DIEGO and SEATTLE - ResMed and Xealth have launched a pilot project that allows primary care physicians at Providence St. Joseph Health to access data from CPAP devices right from their electronic medical record software.

The integration means PCPs no longer have to swivel back and forth from ResMed's AirView portal to their EMR software, company officials say.

“We have integrated AirView data with systems across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific,” said Annie McBride, director, HI Strategic Partnerships, ResMed. “Integrating AirView with America's third largest health system, Providence St. Joseph, through Xealth, can be life-changing for the patients involved and a significant achievement in ResMed's ongoing work to scale AirView's interoperability nationwide and worldwide.”

Xealth's integrated digital prescribing and analytics platform has been incubated in-house at Providence St. Joseph, a Renton, Wash.-based health system that comprises 50 hospitals and 829 physician clinics in six states. The platform allows clinicians to prescribe and track the use of educational content, apps and devices to help monitor care, all from their EMR software.

The integration has two benefits for HME providers, McBride, says: Physicians will no longer have to ask them for the data, and they'll get additional support from physicians to keep patients compliant.

“These are the types of win-win-wins that automation and data integration bring to the healthcare landscape,” she said.

The integration has a number of benefits for Providence St. Joseph, mainly the “democratization” of the process of providing sleep therapy, says Nigel Ball, director of Swedish Sleep Medicine, a part of Providence St. Joseph that provides sleep disorder services from nine locations and serves about 9,000 new patients a year.

“This is not a single episode of care situation and, frankly, we're having trouble getting everybody in,” he said. “This puts more of the simple work on the primary care physician, so we can rely on them for more of the overall management of the patient, and we can step in for more specialty care.”

The integration may seem like a specialized step toward wider interoperability, but when you consider that sleep apnea is often associated with other co-morbidities, it goes a long way, says Aaron Sheedy, COO of Xealth, which was launched through the $150 million Providence Ventures fund.

“The patient comes in to see their primary care doc, and they have other medical issues, so for them, getting a handle on their sleep apnea is a prerequisite for attacking those other issues,” he said. “We're taking these data sets that are relevant to the physician and allowing them to take maximum advantage of that, so patients are getting the right tools and support that they need.”