In this new health care environment, hospitals are faced with the challenge to improve population health management and to enhance patient engagement. Many products on the market can help them do just that.

DOTmed News had the opportunity to speak with Adam Sabloff, chief executive officer of Virtual Health, and Jack Plotkin, chief technology officer of Virtual Health, about their new cloud-based patient engagement and population health management platform.

DOTmed News: How does Virtual Health work?

Adam Sabloff: We put all of the data in one location. In order to successfully analyze a population and keep them out of the hospital, you have to be able to see all of the data including the EMR, claims forms and billing.

We take dozens of different data formats, map them and then aggregate them into one centralized database. You can log in and see a 360 degree view of that patient including every medication they're on, when they went to the doctor and what lab results have been ordered.

DOTmed News: Hospitals are under a lot of pressure to improve population health management while also containing costs. How can this platform help them do that?

Jack Plotkin: A lot of times hospitals are very much involved in the process of ensuring that readmissions are kept low because it's a critical concern for them. Hospitals are no longer forgetting about a patient until the next time they're admitted - now, after handing them off to another part of the health system, they are incentivized to continue to monitor them.

They're doing that to ensure that the patient is compliant with the treatment plan. That ensures that complications are spotted early and issues are addressed before a readmission has to occur.

Some hospitals have rolled out telehealth programs, but a lot of the time they are using legacy equipment. Also, the data that is being picked up is inconsistent since many patients are not compliant with their telehealth devices.

When the telehealth data comes back to the hospital, it's not integrated with the EMR systems. As a result, the nurses may not be reaching the right conclusions and when the patient is seen by a physician at the hospital, they often times won't have access to the system that is capturing the telehealth readings.

If you have a hospital that is at risk for readmissions, they are in need of some kind of technology that allows the patients to be monitored both in the facility and out of the facility. That technology must capture real-time data about the interactions this patient is having with the health system.

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