Remote health-care monitoring using Personal Care Connect

TLDR

Chronic illness care costs nearly $1.27 trillion and is projected to rise, yet timely access to patient health status can enable preventive interventions that reduce hospitalizations and improve quality of life. The authors designed and built Personal Care Connect (PCC) to enable remote patient monitoring and to foster an interoperable ecosystem of medical devices and applications, as demonstrated in pilot tests. PCC is a standards‑based, open platform that integrates devices from vendors and apps from independent software vendors to facilitate remote monitoring, as illustrated in the pilot studies. PCC may lower health‑care costs by shifting focus to preventive monitoring rather than emergency care and hospital admissions.

Abstract

Caring for patients with chronic illnesses is costly—nearly $1.27 trillion today and predicted to grow much larger. To address this trend, we have designed and built a platform, called Personal Care Connect (PCC), to facilitate the remote monitoring of patients. By providing caregivers with timely access to a patient's health status, they can provide patients with appropriate preventive interventions, helping to avoid hospitalization and to improve the patient's quality of care and quality of life. PCC may reduce health-care costs by focusing on preventive measures and monitoring instead of emergency care and hospital admissions. Although PCC may have features in common with other remote monitoring systems, it differs from them in that it is a standards-based, open platform designed to integrate with devices from device vendors and applications from independent software vendors. One of the motivations for PCC is to create and propagate a working environment of medical devices and applications that results in innovative solutions. In this paper, we describe the PCC remote monitoring system, including our pilot tests of the system.