One of the lasting impacts of Covid-19 will be a fundamental change in the structure of our healthcare systems, suggests Eamonn Costello, co-founder and chief executive of patientMpower. The organisation found themselves playing a pivotal part in the struggle to control the spread of Covid-19 in recent months.
“Fundamentally we see ourselves as a healthcare company,” says Costello. “We have a chief scientific officer and a chief medical officer, and everything we do is underpinned by doing studies and validating our approach with healthcare systems as well.”
The company’s beginnings came about through Costello seeing a family member go through illness. “There was no means for healthcare workers to prescribe self-management at home,” he says. “The tools weren’t available.”
“Before Covid we were working predominantly in kidney disease and lung disease,” explains Costello, “in helping patients better manage at home and keeping them out of the hospital for longer”.
One of patientMpower’s projects has been running since 2018 one of New York’s busiest hospitals, NYU Langone. By using monitoring devices at home that can upload data via a smartphone app directly to health care providers, patients are able to avoid repeated visits to clinics. “For example with lung transplant patients at NYU Langone, they can get discharged with home monitoring and record various parameters which is a mix of both objective data, to see how their lungs are doing, and also subjective data which would usually be responding to questionnaires to log how they’re feeling,” explains Costello.
Monitoring patients at home relieves a huge amount of pressure on healthcare systems, says Costello. “Monitoring in this way frees up around 67 per cent of the appointments,” he says. “An awful lot of routine delivery of healthcare involves patients being told to come back in six months. That model is very inefficient for both the healthcare staff, and for the patients in terms of time wasted, but without a solution like ours, they’ve no alternative.”
PatientMpower’s range of supported devices include a spirometer, which measures the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs, and also a pulse oximeter, which is used to measure oxygen saturation levels. It was the latter that proved to be a key player in monitoring Covid-19 patients.
“In February we were all starting to look at what was happening in Italy and have a dawning realisation that this is very serious,” says Costello. “Around that time our chief scientific officer came up with the idea that this is a respiratory illness, and we have a respiratory remote monitoring platform, so why don’t we see what we can do in the crisis.”
“We analysed the WHO’s final report on China, which came out at the end of February, just before the first case in Ireland,” says Costello. “They had identified some objective markers, one of these was blood oxygen level. For patients who are severely ill with Covid, their blood oxygen level can drop substantially. From that we knew that we could develop a solution for monitoring Covid.”
A crucial part of patientMpower’s solution was that it allowed an earlier discharge of recovering patients, who could be monitored at home, while also minimising the risk of exposure by keeping as many patients as possible outside of the hospital building. “The experts that we talked could see a value in being able to manage patients outside of the hospital, because they were preparing for surge in demand,” says Costello.
“From mid-to-late February we were working on this, and we started to build it without any formal go-ahead at the beginning of March. We got approval from the HSE around the 10th March and we deployed it through many of the major hospitals in Dublin, and then around the country.”
Since then patientMpower’s Covid monitoring system has been deployed internationally, and there has been a massive surge in interest for their lung disease and kidney disease remote monitoring solutions. “We’ve seen around five year’s worth of adoption in five months in terms of the roll-out of our technology to other hospitals around the world. And we’ve gone from a team of eight staff to a team of 24 in that same period,” says Costello.
“We were seeing a very slow adoption of this type of remote monitoring before the pandemic,” says Costello. “The hospitals that had adopted us could definitely see that it made sense, but health systems in particular can be slow to change because any change brings risk, but in the current environment there’s a much greater risk in not changing.”