Study Results: Virtual Health Saves Lives During COVID-19

As difficult as the last year has been, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we can quickly deploy and scale virtual care technologies to create a better healthcare system and saves lives.

Remote patient monitoring creates a scalable model for faster, proactive interventions that prevent conditions from worsening, reduce hospitalizations, and reduce utilization – at a time where clinician and hospital capacity was slim. These interventions mean a patient with COVID-19 – by way of sharing their home health device data – can be brought into the hospital before they require a ventilator. These capture of data and system of alerts mean a clinician can know at the precise moment when a patient needs help...and provide it. 

Amidst the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Validic's COVID-19 remote monitoring solution was deployed to thousands of people Kaiser Permanente of the Mid-Atlantic States. The program reduced mortality by 43% in a study with more than 13,000 subjects.

The KPMAS team was able to deploy a remote monitoring program to their patients that saved countless lives, reduced the need for the use of ventilators across the system because they caught the onset of COVID-19 early, and helped them understand how pulse oxygenation served as an early predictor of virus progression.

The full results of the study are impressive. Almost 92% of those patients in the program, most of which tested positive for COVID-19, did not require hospitalization. And, overall the data showed lower healthcare utilization — 20% fewer urgent care visits, emergency room visits and hospital readmissions. 

Thank you to all the providers and healthcare workers — you are heroes. This program is one of many that saved lives during this global pandemic. A special thank you to the KPMAS team. As evidenced in this article, you all created a program that helped your patients get faster care, and saved the lives of your patients, their families and others they could have potentially exposed.

And, a huge thank you to the Validic team. Within three weeks, we went from conceptualizing this solution for COVID-19 to market launching to onboarding our first client. Validic is a company all about personal health data and making the data you generate in your everyday life usable and meaningful for healthcare. No more time in history have these data been critical to patient care and interventions.

Technology is a powerful collaboration tool for care providers and patients. I hope we as an industry are now ready to fully come together to offer our patients and our healthcare workers the technologies and tools needed to be healthy, successful, and live quality lives.