Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles has partnered with Noteworth, a startup from the second cohort of its accelerator, to give physicians in several hospital departments new tools to monitor the health of their patients at home. The deal is a three-year engagement.
Noteworth offers a novel platform for on-demand patient-generated health data. With the system, a physician can order PGHD for a patient from inside the electronic health record, and can select from a menu of vital signs such as blood pressure, blood glucose level and weight, as well as behavioral metrics like medication adherence, mood and activity. Once the provider selects the information he or she wants, Noteworth pulls together a collection of FDA-cleared connected device and delivers it to the patient’s door, along with onboarding support and use training. Data from those devices than shows up in the EHR.
“Providing healthcare is no longer just about seeing the patient when he or she comes to the office,” Joan August, vice president of service line operations at Cedars-Sinai, said in a statement. “Noteworth is improving how we deliver care, giving us a way to continuously engage and monitor our patients. They have tackled an issue that has application for patient populations with chronic diseases to stay healthy while potentially reducing utilization and readmissions.”
Noteworth is being deployed at the hospital’s heart institute, where it will be used with hypertension and congestive heart failure patients; the diabetes treatment and education center, where it will be offered to patients with diabetes and with thyroid disorders; and the obstetrics and gynecology department, where the focus will be on women with high-risk pregnancies.
“Tools like this are valuable in treating patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and weight issues,” Dr. Ruchi Mathur, director of the Diabetes Outpatient Teaching Education Center at Cedars-Sinai, said in a statement. “These conditions require significant patient-doctor interactions for education and medication adjustments, and these interactions are greatly enhanced when data is available to review and discuss. The insight the patient gets by seeing their own data and knowing this will be reviewed is often a stimulus for better control. This insight is a great asset for empowering our patients when they leave the office and are out in the real world.”
Noteworth was a member of the second class of Cedars-Sinai’s accelerator, which the hospital runs in collaboration with TechStars. It’s the latest investment to pay off for the hospital, which has ended up partnering with a number of startups that began in the accelerator, including hospital communications startup Well, online end-of-life platform Grace, virtual reality pain management company AppliedVR, health pricing tool ZendyHealth, and erstwhile senior care provider HomeHero.