HomMed provides interactive sentry for home compliance
By DON LONG
HHBR Contributing Editor
"Help I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up" has become a well-known tagline for comedians and jokes about the elderly. But it’s no laughing matter to the growing number of baby boomers who live at some distance from their aging parents.
Just as great a concern is the expense of hospitalization oft repeated and often resulting from an elderly person’s failure to comply with a drug regimen or other medical instruction. And with the graying of populations in the U.S. and worldwide, this presents a burgeoning market opportunity for companies offering home monitoring systems.
"Many purport to have a home monitoring device," said Herschel Peddicord, president of HomMed (Brookfield, WI) and the main brain behind the firm’s recently approved HomMed Monitoring System. But Peddicord doubts the effectiveness of many of these systems.
He said these systems often depend on too few measurements, or require a certain level of dexterity to do self-monitoring, so that they are often either too simplistic or overly complex. "Eighty-year-old people find it difficult to take their own blood pressure," he said. "And just try to titrate a beta blocker with a scale."
Even video monitoring he considers cumbersome and suspect. How many monitors does the company have, he asked, and who is watching?
Peddicord’s answer to all these questions is the HomMed Monitoring System, which acts as a constant sentry of patient status. "We wanted to put together devices with hospital quality, those devices providing various measurements simultaneously. And parameters can be set for alarms to go off when needed," he said.
Critical to the system is its interactivity with a hospital or physician’s office, plus interactivity between the device and patient, Peddicord said. The HomMed system provides this by talking to the user. At a specified time, it reminds the user to take his or her vital signs, guiding the person through the monitoring steps. It offers a friendly reminder if the "vitals" aren’t then performed, and sends an alarm if they continue unperformed.
Operation of the device requires only a push of two buttons, Peddicord said, and the vital signs are managed easily with a custom-designed blood pressure cuff and a digital thermometer and scale.
The data is collected and transmitted to the HomMed Observer, a station that gathers the information daily and reports it to the patient’s hospital. Over time, the data is trended to indicate changes in condition, thus offering guidance that a physician can use, for instance, to alter medications or other therapy regimens. All of these operations can be easily reprogrammed by the physician to meet specific needs, according to Peddicord.
The result: In a current trial covering 2,000 patient days of monitoring, Peddicord reported, "99.9% of patients [were] doing their vitals every day" and, among those patients, no hospitalizations.
"What we found is that older people will take the pills the doctor prescribes and do the other things necessary if they know someone is watching," he said. And he noted that the consistent daily interactivity of the system goes far beyond physician calls or office visits, which may be erratic and inconvenient.
Initially, the company focused on a population of individuals who have been hospitalized because of congestive heart failure and then released. That population is at extremely high risk of rehospitalization, Peddicord said — "22% are back in the hospital in 30 days, 47% in 90 days." But through word-of-mouth information and interest, the company has provided the system for monitoring other applications.
Future uses will include monitoring of diabetic conditions — "we’ve already identified the testing system for that," Peddicord said — and other chronic problems requiring constant watchfulness.
Currently, the company is providing the systems to hospitals who then charge the patient $6 per day for the service. If HomMed does the monitoring, it charges $13 per day and faxes daily results to the patient’s hospital.
These costs, of course, add up, but Peddicord said that, compared to the price of hospitalization, $200 to $400 a month is "peanuts," and added that "medicine in the United States is just way too expensive."
Peddicord said that the company has received inquiries from "a wide variety of people" concerning the device, and some of those inquiries have suggested the opening of a large new "private, individual market — that is, individuals who live far from their parents and find that the service is extremely reasonable in terms of both reduced costs of care and increased peace of mind. For patients, besides offering greater safety, the system may be the difference between remaining independent in their own homes or having to move to dependent living facilities.
Development of the HomMed system has been rapid, Peddicord said. After a career with several medical device firms, he first began putting a team of people together and raising the money to develop the system about 18 months ago. Initial testing and installation was launched early this year, with Food and Drug Administration 510(k) approval granted two months ago.
Peddicord describes the company’s capitalization as being "in the seven figures," adding that "we have enough cash to get us through." He is predicting profitability before year’s end.
"We’re watching the way the marketplace is going," Peddicord said," noting that it is moving toward an increasing majority of admissions through the hospital emergency room. Those emergencies are specifically what the HomMed Sentry system is designed to avoid, and the patient is the main person who can act to avoid them. "And people," he said, "will participate in their own care if you give them a chance."
He added, "Our No. 1 goal is not to make two red cents, it’s not to make us wealthy, but it’s to improve the quality of life of the patient."
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