AWS for Industries
Stel Life’s Integrated Connected Care Empowers Healthcare Providers
The healthcare industry faces mounting challenges—workforce shortages, clinical burnout, and a rise in chronic conditions. Additionally, monitoring patients post-discharge (ensuring treatment plan adherence and preventing readmissions) are resource-intensive tasks that drive up costs and can be prone to error. New remote patient monitoring technologies can play a crucial role in addressing these challenges.
With 90 percent of the $4.5 trillion U.S. healthcare expenditure going toward chronic physical and mental health conditions, readmissions pose financial challenges for hospitals. In 2024, over 77 percent of hospitals are likely to face penalties under the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, highlighting the urgency to address this issue.
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) technologies can include wearable devices, mobile apps, and other connected health solutions. They help address these challenges by continuously monitoring patients’ health statuses and treatment adherence, and can provide early detection of potential complications.
We’ll discuss how Stel Life (Stel), an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, utilized AWS connected care solutions to help healthcare institutions reduce readmissions, increase patient retention with proactive care, and lower costs.
The challenge
Implementing an RPM solution, while offering significant benefits, comes with operational challenges that can hinder implementation. Managing the technical complexities of remote patient monitoring, coordinating care across multiple connected devices, and integrating data from various Internet of Things (IoT) devices are demanding enough on their own. However, you need to also include transitioning care from the hospital to the home, with installing and maintaining devices within patients’ homes.
Stel Life has built a connected care solution on AWS that enables patient-centric care for chronic condition management while also addressing these challenges. Stel Vitals Hub simplifies connectivity across digital health devices using patented passive pairing technology. It automates medical device pairing, and provides consistent RPM with no need for complex device setup. As a result, this setup benefits elderly and chronic patients, who struggle with the complex RPM device setup and configuration when managing challenging health conditions. Stel uses wireless technology to reliably transmit vital data, even in areas with poor broadband and unstable network connectivity, ensuring real-time monitoring and timely interventions.
Hospitals manage Stel assets within their electronic health records (EHR) allowing configuration and association of patients and devices without exposing identifiers like personal health information (PHI). Stel only saves device and vitals data, not patient identifiers, maintaining patient privacy. Stel secures data transmissions with robust encryption, and integrates with other EHR systems, like Epic and Cerner—streamlining access and analysis for healthcare providers. Medical device partners can use Stel’s EHR connectors to load the vitals into a provider’s EHR solution, even when they lack native integration capability. This eliminates the need for multiple point solutions, ensuring care continuity, and deliver personalized care.
Stel’s connected care architecture on AWS
Stel Hubs transmit measurements from Bluetooth-enabled medical devices to the Stel platform, then to AWS IoT Core. IoT rules analyze the data from the MQTT topic stream and take actions. Stel then routes the valid messages to AWS Lambda, through an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
The Lambda invokes Stel API services that run inside an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The Stel API services process and store the vitals in an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) PostgreSQL database. Stel offers a web frontend hosted with Amazon Route 53, with an Application Load Balancer to distribute incoming traffic to the Stel services running inside the Amazon EC2.
Security and privacy are paramount in Stel Life’s operations. Secure data sharing across different care settings, from the hospital to the patient’s home, remains the top priority for customers. Stel use Amazon GuardDuty to monitor for malicious activity and anomalous behavior. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints are used to reduce exposure and secure their workload. These AWS services help detect malicious traffic, and reduce exposure.
Figure 1: Stel connected care architecture
Stel encrypts the data and stores it in a HIPAA-compliant Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database. By streamlining data collection, Stel empowers healthcare professionals with real-time patient health status monitoring, allowing for early intervention and proactively managing chronic conditions.
Stel also seamlessly integrates medical devices with patient smartphones. Stel’s passive pairing technology automatically connects compatible devices to the patient’s smartphone, eliminating the need for manual pairing or complex setup. Vital signs like heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels are continuously and securely transmitted from the patient’s smartphone to the healthcare provider’s dashboard.
Figure 2: Stel dashboard to assign devices to the hub
Stel’s transformative impact on patient outcomes
Stel’s technology is easy for both patients and providers to use, even for those who are not tech-savvy or lack reliable internet. Stel hub requires minimal training, making remote care easy to integrate into daily life and improves treatment engagement and adherence. Stel empowers healthcare organizations to transform patient care without smartphones or Wi-Fi, improving patient engagement, reducing readmissions, and lowering costs for thousands of patients.
These institutions are already partnering with Stel:
- Tower Health – Reading Hospital reduce hospitalizations by 80 percent, emergency visits by 68 percent, overall readmissions by 77.8 percent, and heart failure readmissions by 84.6 percent.
- Lehigh Valley Health Network created a connected care solution, integrated continuous glucose monitoring into EHR workflows, expanded their RPM to 11,000 patients and transmitted vitals for more than 2.5 million patients.
- Tampa General Hospital maintained a 92 percent patient retention rate, and resolved more than 1,200 medication discrepancies.
- Yale School of Medicine: According to Dr. Spatz, Stel’s technology is crucial to the remote patient monitoring, particularly in making remote blood pressure monitoring accessible to populations that traditionally face technological barriers. Stel’s simplicity and accessibility align with the school’s Pressure Check study’s broader goals of reducing healthcare disparities and improving blood pressure control across diverse communities.
Stel simplifies patient monitoring and solves complexities associated with connecting health monitoring devices to these healthcare providers. These partnerships show Stel’s ability to drive substantial improvements in patient care, operational efficiency, and healthcare outcomes across diverse healthcare settings.
Benefits
Stel’s connected care, powered by AWS, enables healthcare providers and hospitals to deliver seamless, personalized, and cost-effective care.
The key take aways are:
- Connected care reduces readmissions and improves remote monitoring.
- Stel’s AWS-powered solution enables secure, near real-time data transmission for timely interventions.
- Stel integrates medical device data directly into EHRs for personalized, coordinated care.
- Passive pairing technology removes technical barriers for RPM, empowering patients in remote or underserved areas.
- Stel uses IoT, and data analytics to simplify the patient experience, improve outcomes, and reduce administrative strain on healthcare staff.
- Stel drives substantial reductions in hospitalizations, emergency visits, and readmissions, while improving clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
- Connected care democratizes access to quality healthcare, breaking down technological barriers for patients in diverse settings.
Conclusion
Stel Life’s connected care solution, built on AWS, is revolutionizing RPM and chronic disease management. By leveraging IoT, and data analytics Stel enhances clinical outcomes, reduces hospital readmissions, and alleviates the administrative burden on healthcare staff. Designed for seamless integration with existing EHR systems, Stel Life’s technology ensures that even patients who are not tech-savvy or lack access to advanced technology can benefit from personalized, coordinated care.
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