Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Life365 push hospital-at-home care forward

The news: Remote patient monitoring (RPM) company Life365 partnered with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare to help providers and payers scale their hospital-at-home efforts to larger populations at lower costs.

• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will facilitate interoperability and better health data management for Life365’s platform.

How Life365 works: Its virtual care platform integrates data from RPM devices into a health monitoring portal for clinicians, who can then review health data to make prompt clinical decisions and connect with patients virtually if needed.

• Life365 also deploys bundled RPM kits that are personalized to patients’ needs. It supports over 300 medical devices and the kits come pre-configured so they’re ready to use by the time they’re in patients’ hands.

Zooming out on the telehealth and RPM markets: The pandemic-induced digital health boom drove a higher need for hospital-at-home solutions—now, they’re primed to have a permanent seat in the future of healthcare.

• In 2021, 36.1% of the US population (94.2 million people) used telehealth, and we expect that number to rise to 43.3% of the US population (116.6 million people) by 2025, per our Telehealth Users forecast.
• To add, 15.1% of the US population (39.3 million people) used RPM in 2021, which we forecast will increase to 26.2% (70.6 million), according to our RPM Users forecast.

What’s next? Hospital-at-home market competition is becoming fierce as larger digital health players eye the budding market opportunity.

Ever since the CMS established its Acute hospital-at-home initiative (which enabled reimbursement for RPM-enabled virtual care at home programs), the floodgates for hospital-at-home solutions bursted.

• As of this March, the CMS has approved 92 health systems and 204 hospitals across 34 states for this program.

To add, over a dozen major health systems (like Kaiser, Ascension, and Intermountain) banded together with some health tech companies (like Amazon Care and DispatchHealth) to lobby for permanent reimbursement for home healthcare—something that’ll only continue to roll the ball forward for hospital-at-home solutions.