Healthcare is moving to the outpatient setting to save costs, but at home patients struggle with medication adherence and they are readmitted at alarming rates. Hospitals send 1.4 million patients home for 4-6 weeks to administer their own IV antibiotics every year. Twenty percent of patients on outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT) are readmitted, each costing $80,000 on average. This is a $22.4 billion problem. Clinicians at the 12,200 home infusion providers in the US have no objective way to identify non-adherence to intervene and prevent readmissions. Rather, they call patients to detect non-adherence, which is time-consuming, inaccurate, and prone to reporting bias. They need a better tool than a phone to monitor adherence. The solution is HIVE’s patent pending CloudConnect smart catheter. CloudConnect is a reinvented IV line with a simple embedded mechanoelectrical sensor that detects when a medication source is connected. CloudConnect wirelessly sends this information to electronic medical records. HIVE’s value proposition is that clinicians can detect non-adherence in real time and make treatment decisions and prevent costly readmissions based on objective data. HIVE offers CloudConnect as an alternative to the need for clinicians to call every patient with standard IV lines.
