Healthtech Security
Belong Health | January 10, 2024
Belong Health, a company dedicated to advancing patient-centered healthcare and reducing the cost of caring for underserved and complex populations, has announced the formation of
Belong Medical Group to help its plan and provider partners address chronic gaps in patient care.
Belong Medical Group supplements existing care infrastructure with virtual and community-based resources to care for every member – even those that are historically hard to reach. The team includes operators, clinicians, registered nurses, licensed clinical social workers and community health workers with extensive experience serving high-needs populations.
Operating as a separate unit within Belong Health, Belong Medical Group is a transitional care organization that develops clinical programming and wraparound services to help plan partners, providers and provider groups care for members with chronic conditions during changes in their care plans. This improves patient outcomes while reducing overall costs.
Bridging Gaps in Care
Dual-eligible members require more specialty care, particularly in the areas of behavioral health and palliative care. Patients with mental illness combined with one or more chronic conditions average three-times the medical spend compared to patients without mental illness. Almost 45% of dual-eligible patients fall into this category. Belong Medical Group was built to serve high-needs patients, including the 11 million D-SNP members with complex issues, low incomes and pre-existing conditions, to improve outcomes and reduce costs.
"The clinician shortage in the U.S. continues to worsen and existing care delivery models fail to meet the needs of patients, particularly those that are dually eligible,” said Belong Health CEO J. Patrick Foley. “Belong Medical Group is an innovative new model of care delivery that ensures the full integration of services, reduces fragmented care and drives operational efficiencies.”
By providing transitional care, Belong Medical Group helps plans serving D-SNP beneficiaries and providers participating in ACO REACH by
Bridging gaps in care through home-based and virtual specialty care services delivered by trusted members of Belong Medical Group’s Clinician and Care Management team.
Ensuring equitable access to care in urban and rural areas by meeting patients where they are.
Seamlessly integrating with the provider community to ensure that care is coordinated with their local provider for longitudinal care.
Mental Health Connector
Mental Health Connector is the first clinical solution available through Belong Medical Group. It serves patients without a current mental health provider or those with worsening chronic mental illness. These patients are identified during health risk assessments or hospital and ER admissions as having unmet mental health needs that require follow up. MVP Health Care, a regional not-for-profit health insurer serving New York and Vermont, is the first to offer Mental Health Connector to its members.
"Since the inception of our pilot program with Belong Medical Group, we have witnessed notable improvements in the depression scores of our members who have sought care from our dedicated Mental Health Connector clinicians,” said Dr. Carl Cameron, MVP Health Care’s Chief Medical Officer. “This heartening progress reinforces our belief that collaborative efforts can truly shape a brighter future for those with diverse health care needs. Belong Health and Belong Medical Group stand as trusted partners who share our unwavering dedication to providing high-quality care to a complex population. We value their expertise and their commitment to working hand-in-hand with us, ensuring that our members receive the comprehensive support they need.”
Patients enrolled in Mental Health Connector receive treatment from Belong Medical Group's clinicians for up to 90 days. The treatment plan put in place by Belong Medical Group’s psychiatrist or mental health specialist is then transitioned to either the patient's PCP for ongoing management, or to a longitudinal mental health clinician in the community. The goal is to both diagnose and address unmet mental health needs when patients need it most and then to triage the right level of care for the patient long-term once the issues are stabilized. This bridge to longitudinal care not only reduces the cost of care, it improves quality scores.
“These programs are essential. We need to meet patients where they are to help them better stick to their care plans during transitional phases,” said Dr. Ramon Jacobs-Shaw, President of Belong Medical Group and Chief Clinical Officer at Belong Health. “Too many people, especially seniors and dually eligible individuals, have needs that are not met by the existing care delivery landscape. Belong Medical Group provides smarter and more targeted services to those patients to make sure their needs are fulfilled, improving outcomes and overall community health.”
About Belong Health
Belong Health provides a new approach to health insurance by establishing deep partnerships with providers and insurers. This innovative model empowers us to address the unfulfilled requirements of underserved and complex needs populations in a more patient-centric way. Through fully risk-bearing partnerships, Belong Health helps insurers deliver products that provide more collaborative care to the MA and D-SNP population. Belong Health is also an accredited Accountable Care Organization, dedicated to delivering value-based care for Medicare FFS. Our mission is to offer more compassionate, collaborative and smarter healthcare solutions for underserved and complex needs populations.
Read More
Health Technology, AI
Swoop | January 09, 2024
Swoop, a leader in developing precise direct to consumer (DTC) and healthcare provider (HCP) audiences for pharmaceutical and life sciences brands, today announced the launch of its AI-powered conversational agent. This groundbreaking advancement in healthcare marketing sets a new standard for lower funnel engagement, enabling immediate, MLR-compliant virtual customer interactions via brand.com.
“Swoop’s AI-powered conversational agent marks the first groundbreaking advancement for brand.com since the introduction of pharmaceutical websites in the 1990s, addressing a pressing need for innovation in how the industry engages with their customers,” said Scott Rines, underscoring the historic significance of this achievement. “Patients and physicians are looking for real-time information, 24/7/365 during their moment of need, but are often faced with an overwhelming experience on brand.com. They come to the site seeking fast, clear answers to their health-related questions – our agent solves this.”
Market conditions continue to remain a challenge with shortages of healthcare professionals despite an uptick in customer demand for information related to their condition and treatment decisions. Meanwhile, HCPs are also less likely to allow medical reps into their offices, a shift that has continued post-Covid. Instead, these increasingly digital-native, often over-extended, physicians prefer to seek information online when their schedule permits, limiting the impact of personal promotion.
“The ability to parse the data derived from lower funnel conversations with HCPs and patients in real time will prove invaluable, as these signals will become proprietary 1st party data to optimize future marketing spend and messaging,” added Rines.
Key Features of Swoop's Conversational Agent
Dynamic Patient Conversations: Patients and HCPs can engage with conversational AI in real-time, creating a personalized and responsive user experience to drive more high-value actions on a health brand website.
MLR-Approved Medical Information: Leveraging advanced algorithms, conversational AI provides MLR-approved answers to both simple and complex medical questions in the moment of need, enhancing the overall user experience for both patients and HCPs.
Real-Time Patient Insights: Valuable real-time data from conversations accessible via dashboards allows healthcare brands to assess the effectiveness of their messaging and make informed adjustments promptly.
Scalable to Client Demands: Whether for a single brand, therapeutic area or product portfolio, Swoop conversational AI agents can scale with the needs of healthcare marketers from new product launches to covering open territories and unsupported brands.
Patient Data Security and Compliance: Swoop prioritizes patient privacy and data security, ensuring that all conversational AI agents operate in compliance with the highest industry standards and regulations.
Typical Client Results Seen by Customers
96% – Average answer success rate of inquiries
5.2 minutes – Typical conversation duration
4.7/5 – Average user satisfaction rating
800% – Increase in high-value activities on brand websites
Swoop’s conversational AI technology is built on more than 1.3 billion conversations with patients and providers and has been trained under the supervision of physicians and medically trained clinicians. Unlike generative AI, which can hallucinate and is not appropriate for direct patient and HCP interaction in the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry, Swoop conversational AI uses fine-tuned large language models to understand user intent and surface the most relevant MLR-approved answers to ensure compliance, accuracy and, most importantly, safety.
About Swoop
Swoop, part of Real Chemistry, enables pharmaceutical and life sciences brands to reach their ideal DTC and HCP audiences at crucial moments of their diagnosis and treatment journey. Using ML/AI and real world data, Swoop is a leader in developing brand-exclusive audiences of patients and their providers for healthcare companies. Once the right customers have been targeted, brands can drive bottom-of-the-funnel engagement through Swoop’s proprietary medically trained and MLR-compliant conversational AI. Built on a privacy-by-design foundation, Swoop is both HIPAA-certified and NAI accredited, having developed more than 12,000 unique target audiences for 42 of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies safely. Its conversational AI has been implemented across 100 health brands and trained on over 1.3 billion medical conversations.
Read More
Healthcare Analytics
Keystone Healthcare Partners | February 05, 2024
Keystone Healthcare Partners a leading provider of emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care medicine, and telehealth staffing and management services, as well as revenue cycle management, recently announced that it has formed a partnership with Trinity Medical in Ferriday, Louisiana. Keystone's delivery of emergency medicine services at Trinity Medical will commence on February 1, 2024.
This contract represents an exciting expansion of Keystone's regional influence into Louisiana; the company has managed contracts in Mississippi for decades. Glenn Adams, Keystone's CEO & Co-founder, notes, "We are excited to kick off another partnership with a client where we see opportunity for real impact. We've hit the ground running to shore up areas of frustration for the client and bring value-add and innovative solutions, such as Keystone Connect AI technology to the emergency medicine program."
While the healthcare landscape has been challenging for rural and critical access hospitals, the two entities share a patient-centered ethos that will be paramount to the partnership. The two entities share a community- and patient-focus that is embodied by Trinity's motto, "People you know, caring for people you love."
"We are very excited to start our partnership with Keystone Healthcare," states Keisha Smith, CEO of Trinity. "My goal for Trinity Medical has always been to provide our patients with the best healthcare and customer service possible in the Miss-Lou area. We feel that Keystone shares the same goals that we have and will be a true asset to our hospital. Henry Ford stated, 'Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.' We are looking forward to a long lasting, successful partnership with Keystone Healthcare."
Trinity Medical, a 23-bed licensed facility, continues to grow and upgrade their services and facilities in addition to recruiting physicians to meet the growing needs of their expanding community.
About Keystone Healthcare
Keystone Healthcare™ is a leading provider of Emergency Medicine, Hospital Medicine, Critical Care Medicine and Telehealth clinical management services and staffing solutions for hospitals. We efficiently deliver high-quality, patient-centered care through strong physician leadership and involved management that drive our innovative and integrated business model.
About Trinity Medical
Trinity Medical is operated by Concordia Parish Hospital Service District No. 1. Trinity Medical, formerly Riverland Medical Center, opened in 1964 as Concordia Parish Hospital and has continuously served the residents of the area for more than 55 years.
In addition to emergency and acute care, Trinity Medical offers surgical services, diagnostic imaging, infusion center, cardio-respiratory care, gastroenterology, lab services, otolaryngology, urology, and an in-hospital rehabilitation service as well as an extensive range of out-patient services, both diagnostic and for treatment.
Read More
Digital Healthcare, Medical Devices
Mindray North America | January 12, 2024
Mindray, a global developer of technologies and solutions for patient monitoring, anesthesia, and ultrasound, announced a five-year agreement with WakeMed Health & Hospitals (WakeMed), a leading health system in Raleigh, N.C. The nationally recognized 970-bed not-for-profit health care system selected Mindray's intuitive patient monitoring systems—including the BeneVision Distributed Monitoring System (DMS) and BeneVision N-series Patient Monitoring Systems—for its three hospitals.
As part of the agreement, approximately 2,300 monitoring devices will be installed in WakeMed's emergency and inpatient areas, across all acuity levels, to help assess and facilitate patient care, monitor vitals and condition changes in real-time, and provide seamless data integration during patient transport throughout its facilities.
"We are very excited to collaborate with WakeMed," stated Wayne Quinn, President, Mindray North America. Wayne continued, "Our purpose is to provide our customers with progressive technology that helps them deliver the highest quality care now and in the future, aligning with a shared vision of better healthcare for all. The contract with WakeMed underscores our commitment to ensuring the health system has access to tools and technologies that enable clinicians to work more efficiently while helping WakeMed fulfill its mission to improve the health and well-being of their community by providing outstanding and compassionate care to all."
"Mindray's monitoring technology will allow us to further improve patient safety, efficiency and clinical workflow as we continue to deliver life-changing care," said Neal Chawla, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) for WakeMed. "Alongside comprehensive patient monitoring, these innovative tools help prevent alarm fatigue and create a quieter, more restful environment for patients—a critical element to promote healing."
The BeneVision N-Series consists of six monitors with the same user interface. It allows healthcare facilities to choose their ideal display size and parameter capabilities, putting precise, relevant data at clinicians' fingertips. As the first-ever patient monitoring platform to incorporate capacitive touch screen technology across all of its monitors, N-Series enables clinicians to cut minutes off of clinical review, analysis and charting time, leading to increased efficiencies and driving positive patient outcomes. The N-Series' modular design expands, providing a scalable solution and the ability to flex from low acuity to high acuity, seamless data integration during transport, and flexible licensing options.
Mindray's BeneVision DMS provides continuous, real-time access and surveillance across large and small healthcare networks and integrates and displays patient information from networked bedside monitors, vital signs monitors, wireless transport solutions, and telemetry transmitters – supporting up to 1,200 devices across the enterprise, locally, and remotely. The BeneVision DMS enables clinicians to observe, manage and document a patient's condition in support of high-quality, patient-centric care, from admission to discharge.
About Mindray
Mindray is a leading developer, manufacturer, and supplier of medical device solutions and technologies used in healthcare facilities around the globe. We believe we can change lives by making the most advanced healthcare technology attainable for all. We do this by empowering healthcare professionals through innovative, high-value solutions that help create the next generation of lifesaving tools across three primary business segments: medical imaging, patient monitoring and life support, and in-vitro diagnostics. Mindray maintains its global headquarters in Shenzhen, China; Mindray North America is headquartered in Mahwah, New Jersey. Our Ultrasound Innovation Center is located in Silicon Valley, with additional facilities in major international markets around the world.
About WakeMed Health & Hospitals
Serving the community since 1961, WakeMed is a not-for-profit health care system founded and based in Raleigh, N.C. WakeMed exists to improve the health and well-being of our community by providing outstanding and compassionate care to all. WakeMed's 970-bed system comprises a network of facilities throughout the Triangle area, including three full-service hospitals, seven emergency departments, a dedicated Children's Hospital and Rehabilitation Hospital, more than 90 physician offices and Wake County's only Level I Trauma Center. WakeMed's mission-driven team includes more than 10,300 employees, 1,400 volunteers and 1,300 affiliated physicians, along with the more than 700 physicians and providers with WakeMed Physician Practices – all representing the best minds and the biggest hearts and the finest quality in health care and community health.
Read More