Could Better Post-Acute-Care Communication Impact Medtech?

Surgeons often struggle to follow up on patients after procedures, given the healthcare handovers that usually occur from hospitals to skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers, or home health providers.
Ben Forrest, who spent the last 5 years at Stryker working with surgeon customers, is well aware of such challenges. “Surgeons are discharging multiple patients to multiple post-acute-care companies and entities,” he told MD+DI. “There is very little now currently in place for collaboration between the acute team and the post-acute team. Hospitals have had to build their own solutions and infrastructure for follow up.”
Forrest decided to step up with his own solution. He developed and founded Olio, a real-time communication platform that digitally connects hospital and physician teams with post-acute providers around the patient's episode type. “Working in the device world, we saw that surgeons want to do what they do,” he said. “Right now, physicians don’t have these [communication] tools. Olio relieves the burden on hospitals of having to do this themselves. The digital collaboration allows surgeons and others from the acute team to see a patient’s progress as well as how much care they have been given after leaving the hospital.” There’s also an opportunity for patients...

Source: MDDI - February 21, 2019 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Daphne Allen Tags: Software Source Type: news