Reducing medical visits reduces impact on healthcare workers and supply chain
The pandemic heightened the need for providing virtual medical care in the home. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised healthcare providers in locations where COVID-19 was emerging to develop more telehealth and telemedicine practices to reduce the risk of transmission and lessen the burden on healthcare workers, especially front-line workers.
According to the CDC, telehealth or telemedicine visits were up 154% at the end of March 2020 compared to March 2019. And 69% of patients who were treated via a telehealth visit during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 were able to manage their own care at home, with 26% having been advised to seek care from their doctor as their condition worsened. Only 1.5% of those telehealth patients were sent to an emergency room.
Alanté CEO Mark Hansen’s vision was coming to fruition: “The pandemic provided the proof of concept that a virtual medical home model could result in superior care for patients in the comfort of their own home.”
Alanté launched at the beginning of 2021 as an integrated virtual healthcare solution. This provides a more complete healthcare solution with the patient’s physician in the comfort of the patient’s home. The goal was to not only track a patient’s medical records and provide remote monitoring, but also to focus on the psychological, physical and social determinants of senior care without taxing the already-stressed healthcare system. Alanté’s secure cloud-based platform makes it easier to manage senior patients and those with chronic conditions in need of chronic care management or remote patient monitoring.
Patients often must act as the bridge between different care providers because their caregivers use disparate systems. Treatment history, prescriptions, conversations between patients and physicians, and appointments live in real-time platforms that don’t talk to each other. But Alanté’s integrated solution does.
Secondarily to a more effective and efficient way to see patients, the operational model of Alanté saves on the expenditure of single-use resources that are often created by necessity in a healthcare environment. Alanté’s solution additionally lessens the burdens on patients (traveling can be stressful) and all often overlooked logistics that come with medical appointments.
The value of the company’s mission will live on long past the pandemic, because it provides a full suite of services that empowers patients and their families, and informs physicians.