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Good news for all diabetes sufferers, their families, and clinicians treating them! Validic, the leading platform for patient-generated health data integration and analysis, announced on October 17th, a partnership with DexCom, Inc., a leader in continuous glucose monitoring (CGM).
This will ensure some part of the healthcare system is one step closer to full interoperability, which is needed for better, faster, and more efficient care. Through this partnership, the Validic data connectivity platform will integrate Dexcom CGM data from Dexcom’s cloud API. One of the first multi-measure platforms able to stream clinical data straight into clinical workflows will thus be created.
The availability of such a platform is of utmost importance nowadays, as the healthcare industry produces ever more home health and wearable technologies, which, coupled with new financial models, are ensuring the advancement of data-driven care.
Instantly obtaining necessary information is crucial in diabetes treatment. A patient’s condition can go from bad to worse in a matter of minutes. Especially in children, diabetes is very hard to control, and parents, as well as doctors, are struggling to find new, better ways to deal with it. Diabetes is currently the fifth deadliest disease in the U.S.. Consequently, patient access to monitoring devices is crucial; so is clinician access to the most up-to-date patient data.
To provide valuable care programs and interventions, medical staff need access to patient data. The ability to directly integrate the data into the clinical workflow, means providers can easily tap into patient-generated health data (PGHD) and incorporate it into programs of care, the final aim being to better manage chronic and post-acute conditions.
The Validic platform can learn and analyse data with such speed, that the outcome means more personalized, automated treatment allowing caregivers to manage by exception. Basically, care teams can spend more time directly helping patients, because technology can elevate critical data when necessary.
The patient’s wearables, health apps, in-home medical devices, etc. provide biometric data which, when used in conjunction with continuous glucose monitoring data, offer a complete view of the patient’s health, thus establishing the premises for more informed, proactive care decisions.
What is technically needed to make it work?
A proprietary intraday data model was built to support standardization and delivery, so the Validic platform could accommodate complex, high-frequency PGHD – like data from CGMs, as well as sleep, activity, and more. Thanks to this model, high-frequency data can appear in the stream almost in real-time, which means Dexcom CGM data is available every five minutes.
Care providers are now able to understand what is happening and why, by quickly accessing their patients’ home health information. The company started its efforts last year, by launching Validic Inform, healthcare’s first data connectivity platform with near real-time streaming capabilities. The platform makes it possible for triggered alerts and notifications to be programmed, so patients can better manage their disease, and the their treatment process.
The Validic platform will integrate Validic’s 350-plus connections to in-home medical devices, wearables and health apps, along with data from the Dexcom G5® and G6® Mobile Apps. It will also contain contextual data such as insulin use, periods of activity, and carbohydrate consumption information that is manually uploaded from a receiver using the Dexcom CLARITY® uploader.
The platform acts like a special dictionary, combined with a translator, that is able to collect data from patients and use it to make healthcare, life science and wellness organizations better understand their users’ health and be aware of their needs.
“The availability of continuous data offers healthcare practitioners new opportunities to deliver proactive care and take steps to prevent negative health events or readmissions,” said Drew Schiller, CEO of Validic.
“To effectively manage the better health of a growing population with chronic diseases, data-driven care delivery is critical – and these data must be integrated into the clinical workflow in order to facilitate clinician adoption and the best outcomes for patients.”
This partnership is part of a larger effort to improve the interoperability of clinical systems and provide better access to continuous data in order to deliver improved patient care.
Not only has Validic released the Statistics Engine, the company has also been awarded a patent for its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology within Validic VitalSnap®, as announced October 19th at the Connected Health Conference.
Validic VitalSnap is a two-years-old mobile technology that enables patients to use their smartphone cameras to read and record health data from their legacy, in-home medical devices. This was needed because many of those devices were not connected to wireless networks, so the data was hard to extract.
The newly obtained patent recognizes the VitalSnap method for optical character recognition of external segmented displays using a smartphone camera. The information is captured, then digitized in real time, recorded within an application and then transmitted to a providers’ electronic health record (EHR) or patient portal.
Validic guides healthcare organizations through the technical complexities associated with accessing and operationalizing patient-generated health data. Validic’s scalable, secure solutions help medical professionals improve operational efficiency and patient outcomes by seamlessly delivering personal health data from hundreds of home health devices into existing clinical workflows.