CRANSTON – Seniorlink Inc.’s Vela app allowing HIPPA-secure collaboration puts patients, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and caregivers on the same page, helping Rhode Island Primary Care Physicians Corp. (RIPCPC) members better administer complex treatments requiring multiple disciplines and medications.
The platform-neutral software for smart devices (phones, tablets, etc.) provides a “virtual care room” granting everyone involved in a patient’s care real-time communication and access to information, according to their need to know, said Noah Benedict, COO of RIPCPC.
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The software gives information on medications prescribed and filled, medical tests required and upcoming appointments to all the medical personnel involved in the care management plans of commercial and Medicare patients with complex or chronic diseases.
Vela is intended to replace outdated care coordination methods, such as calls and texts messages, with a single, centralized, secure communication platform.
Caregivers, crucial agents of patients’ treatment, often left out of the loop, are now in the fold.
“I can’t state well enough how important having the caregiver in the system is,” said Benedict.
Caregivers, family, loved ones or friends, are often tasked with making sure patients get to their appointments, fill their prescriptions, and help pass information between doctors, nurses and pharmacists.
“So what this platform does is it organizes all of that activity,” Benedict said.
The platform also allows varying levels of individual access to medical information, said Tom Riley, Seniorlink’s CEO.
Riley said the permissions aspect of the application is like his recent visit to the hospital with his aunt, who is blind and lives at home.
Three weeks ago, when his aunt fell and they visited her doctor, the physician discussed the fall with a nurse and the two agreed on an exam. The doctor then pulled a curtain around Riley’s aunt’s bed, blocking him from the exam.
“I could hear them but I didn’t have permission to be behind the curtain,” Riley said.
In the same way, Riley said, Vela creates a HIPPA-secure environment where a combination of people are granted varying levels of access to information, allowing medical professionals and caregivers to act on a person’s care without exposing sensitive information.
The system makes it much easier for patients with multiple medical conditions, often taking as many as 15 medications daily, to keep up with their medicine and diet needs. Even caregivers can find it difficult to keep up.
“You can just imagine the fatigue of taking 12 to 15 medications a day,” Riley said. “People get tired of it.”
Vela helps teams of medical professionals live up to the presumption of omniscience many patients invest in the medical professionals attending to them throughout their medical care.
“Your assumption is as a patient that your doctor understands all of this at the intimate level that we are talking about, but they don’t,” Benedict said.
The system will be offered in a six-month pilot program to 500 managed care patients in RIPCPC’s network of 150 Rhode Island doctors, Benedict said. The service will be provided to RIPCPC’s members and their patients at no additional cost, Benedict said.
“RIPCPC’s adoption of Vela for its community is an important step toward ensuring that caregivers are fully integrated into health care decisions so that patients can receive the most effective, and most supportive care possible,” Riley said.
Rob Borkowski is a PBN reporter.
