At the 9th Annual Wireless Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA)’s Convergence Summit 2014 in San Diego, three companies from a pool of finalists emerged as winners of the TripleTree iAward for Connected Health. On Day 1 of the conference, the twelve finalists took the stage, showcasing a diverse blend of innovative wireless health solutions.
The list of finalists included both familiar names and newer startups, and tackled issues all across medicine. Award winners included Advanced ICU Care for their tele-ICU platform, ShapeUp for their highly connected and socially integrated employee wellness programs, and AirStrip for the data aggregation and analysis tools behind their patient monitoring platform.
Advanced ICU Care: Remote Tele-ICU Monitoring
The iAward for Clinical Effectiveness went to Advanced ICU Care, which offers centralized critical care management in 24/7 “command centers” that treat patients in multiple hospitals. CEO Lou Silverman shared about the growing problem of too few intensivists, and the wasted hours spent during the nights where ICU’s shift to a holding pattern until the day team returns.
Their Tele-ICU solutions provide continuous monitoring from remote intensivists, who have live access to patient data, and provide 2-way telemonitoring to work together with hospital-based care teams. According to their studies, partner hospitals have benefited from decreased lengths of stay, improved mortality, reduced days on a ventilator, reduced ICU re-admissions, and better adherence to practice guidelines.
ShapeUp: Employee Wellness for the Digital Revolution
Founder-CEO Dr. Rajiv Kumar presented ShapeUp, the employee wellness program he designed to solve the problem of outdated, broken wellness programs of the past that “isolate the user.” His company, which was recognized as the iAward winner for Consumer Engagement, presents an employee wellness solution that caters to customer preferences in our digital age: with mobile devices, wearable sensors, and social networks.
While digital employee wellness is a competitive space, ShapeUp has succeeded in building an impressive client list including Raytheon, HP, and Aetna; this success was driven by working closely alongside these companies to create campaigns tailor-made for their clients and their employees. Dr. Kumar claimed that their goal is to become the “Intel Inside” of such programs, rather than forcing every company to conform to an existing program.
Continuing this theme of flexibility and modernization, their platform allows users to bring their own fitness trackers and devices. ShapeUp also has found significant success in increasing user engagement by creating viral success with social network features. Dr. Kumar highlighted the stickiness of their campaigns by revealing that the average BMI of their users is 30 (borderline obese), which shows that they aren’t just preaching to the worried well.
AirStrip: Highly Versatile Patient Data Aggregation
AirStrip, likely the most established and well-known of the finalists, took the stage to tout their highly flexible solutions for gathering, and displaying massive quantities of patient information, which later earned the iAward for Operational Effectiveness.
Versatility seemed to underscore every aspect of AirStrip’s universal platform that prides itself for being able to support multiple vendors, devices, operating systems, and types of data. COO Dr. Patterson commented: other companies claim to be agnostic, but “being truly agnostic is hard.”
AirStrip has built their AirStrip ONE Platform in a modular fashion to support all sorts of patient data, and present it in a meaningful way to a wide array of outlets, from hospital monitoring screens to physician’s smartphone and tablets.
Conclusion
The impressive caliber of the TripleTree iAward winners highlights the depth of the twelve finalists showcased at the WLSA Convergence Summit, which in turn reflects the rapid and wide-scale innovation that is taking place globally in wireless health.
iMedicalApps.com covered the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA)’s Convergence Summit 2014 , which took place in San Diego on May 15th to 16th, 2014. The Summit is WLSA’s annual flagship event where healthcare, technology and wireless health communication leaders tackle key issues facing the connected health community.
