How It Works
The real opportunity in healthcare is to transcend its most sacred foothold, the hospital and clinic, and create a world where every patient and family is able to leverage the information and knowledge formulated for patient populations and make them actionable and inclusive of patients and families who must deal with everyday care needs prescribed for them. Vital eCareTM accomplishes this by designing and building a suite of cloud-based services supporting this new model of care delivery. While the hospitals and clinics continue to be the center of health discovery prescribed along lines of disease management, they can now partner with patients and families beyond the clinic with real time collaborative care. The integrated components that comprise the patent-pending Vital eCare™ platform are 1) Vital SPHERE™ (Secure Personal Health Electronic Resource and Exchange, 2) Care Team and Personal Support Team Collaboration Engine, 3) Care planning and management tools, called Vital DREAMS™ that support a structured set of actionable activities planning for relevant health domains - Diet/nutrition, Rest/sleep, Exercise/activity, Attitude/behavioral health, Medications/therapies and Specialists, and 4) a Knowledge Engine that provides both rules-based Virtual Health Assistance to each individual, and population-based analytics (using de-identified data) that contribute to both platform improvement and healthier populations. These components each support secured and comprehensive patient health profiles designed to provide role-based access to data and services to all authorized users involved in the patient's care, who in turn use the suite of secured collaboration and project management tools for care planning and care management, including proactive monitoring, within a secured and privacy-protective environment.
VITAL DREAMS™
A cohesive and consolidated solution that enables the integration of multiple prescribed care plans from across a care continuum into one actionable lifestyle plan created by a collaboration of providers, patients, and families. The DREAMS tool guides users through each domain of care; Diet/nutrition, Rest/sleep, Exercise/activity, Attitude/behavioral health, Medications/therapies and Specialist services (DREAMS™). Care plan and lifestyle improvement activities and needs are captured in a personal calendar that enables the individual and their personal support team members to sign up, assign, manage, and track activities and needs through reminders, messages, alerts, and to suggest plan changes based on progress (or lack thereof) towards completing the individual’s activities and meeting their goals.
VITAL SPHERE™
(Secure Personal Health Electronic Resource and Exchange) – Each patient’s SPHERE™ health profile is secure and private, and patients control the authorization of their care team to access, use and monitor DREAMS™ plan compliance and progress towards desired outcomes. For patients who visit multiple specialists, all of their medical records are accessible within SPHERE™. Designed to break down barriers to sharing of medical and health related information on the whole of a patient, Vital eCare™ has implemented a cloud-based data model for all aspects of a patient’s health. This includes health records that are sourced through today’s interoperability standards along with social determinants of health (SDOH) information and patient recorded vitals and daily, weekly, and monthly data recorded through use of DREAMS™. In addition to this consolidated health profile being secure and private, patients control the authorization of its access and use to those they choose to be part of their care team, both clinical and non-clinical. Patients challenged by having to manage multiple chronic diseases managed by multiple specialists can electronically engage those specialists once authorized, and SPHERE™ becomes the aggregated single view point of all of that patient’s disparate electronic medical records. The daily recordings of DREAMS™ information by the patient and internet enabled devices the patient uses are also captured and stored in SPHERE™. This patient generated health related information is then accessible across the care continuum by clinical teams authorized by patient and by the patient’s personal care team. Gaining insight into current health status from SPHERE™ is key to ongoing informed care decisions.
Collaboration Engine
Designed to provide a single, secure electronic channel for communicating and collaborating online across the care continuum, Vital eCare™ is implementing an integrated collaboration engine. This feature is designed to enable messaging, alerts, notifications within the platform and keep the communications secure within the platform. Authorized users can engage in patient care using this feature and eliminate the need for multiple modes of communicating, such as text, email, voice, etc. Message groups can be created by users to specify who they want to involve in topical discussions, with indicators to show whether or not they have been received and read by the intended audience. The collaboration engine can be used in coordinating discrete care plan elements of the DREAMS™ plan, such as sending messages to the team authorized in determining a patient’s diet and nutrition as an example.
Knowledge Engine
The Vital eCare™ Knowledge Engine is implemented and extensively used as its Virtual Health Assistant (VHA) to support best practices and optimal use of the suite of tools aimed at superior user experience across the care continuum. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Virtual Health Assistant can anticipate and guide users to best use of the tools. The VHA understands how best to complete a SPHERE™ profile or a complete DREAMS™ plan. By reviewing completeness of profile and/or completeness of DREAMS™ plans, the tool can identify and suggest improvements to building out both. When creating the exercise plans for a patient, the VHA will present to those collaborating what exercises conflict with a patient’s problem list. An example might be the VHA suggesting swimming as opposed to jogging due to chronic lower back pain reported in patient’s “Problem List” in SPHERE™. These examples highlight how the tool can help to optimize use of the platform.
VITAL SPHERE™
(Secure Personal Health Electronic Resource and Exchange) – Each patient’s SPHERE™ health profile is secure and private, and patients control the authorization of their care team to access, use and monitor DREAMS™ plan compliance and progress towards desired outcomes. For patients who visit multiple specialists, all of their medical records are accessible within SPHERE™. Designed to break down barriers to sharing of medical and health related information on the whole of a patient, Vital eCare™ has implemented a cloud-based data model for all aspects of a patient’s health. This includes health records that are sourced through today’s interoperability standards along with social determinants of health (SDOH) information and patient recorded vitals and daily, weekly, and monthly data recorded through use of DREAMS™. In addition to this consolidated health profile being secure and private, patients control the authorization of its access and use to those they choose to be part of their care team, both clinical and non-clinical. Patients challenged by having to manage multiple chronic diseases managed by multiple specialists can electronically engage those specialists once authorized, and SPHERE™ becomes the aggregated single view point of all of that patient’s disparate electronic medical records. The daily recordings of DREAMS™ information by the patient and internet enabled devices the patient uses are also captured and stored in SPHERE™. This patient generated health related information is then accessible across the care continuum by clinical teams authorized by patient and by the patient’s personal care team. Gaining insight into current health status from SPHERE™ is key to ongoing informed care decisions.