Hillel's Tech Corner: Datos Health: Redefining remote care

Patients using the platform can continuously measure and record their body temperature, while medical staff can initiate video calls with patients to check on their condition and provide reassurance.

By HILLEL FULD
Datos Health. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Datos Health.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
If I had to sum up this year in one word, after the obvious choice of “COVID,” the word would be “remote”: remote work, remote learning, remote everything.
But somehow, where we are most vulnerable and where we need “remote” the most, our health, we have yet to make a full transition, to the extent that patients are still going to doctors’ office, despite blatant warnings from every news and social media source about potentially endangering themselves via exposure to COVID-19.
It reminds me of a Jackie Mason joke: Three people are competing over whose doctor is the most exclusive. One says, “It takes two months to get an appointment!” The second guy says “Two months?? That’s nothing! Mine takes six months!” The third guy says “My doctor is so hard to get an appointment with, no one has ever seen him. One guy saw him and died.”
The thought of going to the doctor and thereby increasing our health risk is ironic at best, idiotic at worst. There has to be a better way.
Meet Datos Health, a company looking to redefine remote care with an end-to-end remote-care automation platform, enabling care delivery across any clinical condition so that patients can receive the best possible medical care and attention from the comfort of their own home.
Today, many doctors see patients over Zoom or other video platforms, but when more complex medical treatment and care is required, patients still need to come in to the office or clinic.
In response to this new trend, Datos’s platform aims to provide remote treatment that improves system efficiency, mainly by offering care providers the possibility of giving risk-free remote care to a larger number of patients, especially those with chronic conditions or who are immunocompromised.
The company’s robust and flexible automated remote care and telemedicine solution allows medical staff to handle even the most complex patient situations remotely. Its core advantage is in merging remote care with existing clinical work flows to help health organizations increase their productivity and keep costs down, without having to compromise on quality of care or patient experience.
The company’s platform includes three main components:
1. Care Pathways Design Studio: A code-less, drag-and-drop-based tool that enables physicians and clinicians to easily design any remote-care program utilizing robust data, protocol and communication engines.
2. Virtual Patient Management Dashboard: A care-team control interface that provides full visibility of the medical condition of every single patient or a holistic view of the team’s entire patient population. Additionally, alerts and messages can be automatically triggered and delivered via the dashboard or in text/email.
3. The Patient Experience: Care primarily delivered by a personalized mobile app that simplifies monitoring, communication and surveys via video, text and chat – keeping patients involved throughout their care journeys and increasing their engagement and adherence to treatment.
One of the many fascinating aspects about Datos is that its technology caters to patients, medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies alike, and is already in use by leading healthcare providers and pharma corporations.
For patients, Datos provides increased confidence and effectively reduces their overall anxiety by providing a “never on your own” safety net. It automates and streamlines care-related tasks and follow-ups – all without necessitating costly care team workforce expansion.
For medical professionals, Datos equips care teams with the tools they require to remotely manage complex clinical protocols, and automates provision of personalized remote care, all at a fraction of the cost of alternative offerings.
For the pharmaceutical companies, Datos provides an innovative solution that enables companies to focus fully on new drug development and testing, assess adherence, and rapidly detect and act on any irregular symptoms.
TO DATE, the Datos platform has been successfully installed to care for:
• Cardiac patients with congestive heart failure, those with left ventricular assist devices, cardiac rehab and other programs;
• Oncology patients undergoing different treatments, ranging from oral chemo to CAR-T cell therapy;
• Patients in home hospitalization settings;
• Patients suffering from long-term chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension; and
• High-risk pregnancy scenarios.
On the COVID-19 front, Datos’s platform has been successfully deployed by leading healthcare providers worldwide, including Rochester Regional Health in New York and Israel’s Sheba Medical Center. The platform enables the remote monitor and care of COVID-19 patients with symptoms of low severity, in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed in the event of widespread outbreak.
Patients using the platform can continuously measure and record their body temperature, while medical staff can initiate video calls with patients to check on their condition and provide reassurance.
Datos recently announced a partnership with Vaica Medical, a leading provider of medication-adherence solutions, to add medication adherence to its telehealth platform. The partnership addresses the lack of patient adherence to treatments and the challenge this poses by impacting patients’ recovery, which results in a greater burden on healthcare providers. The solution has already been implemented within Sheba Medical Center’s Psychiatric Division.
Founded in 2015, Datos has raised a total of $9.2 million from leading investors, including Crescendo Venture Partners, Vertex Ventures, Angular Ventures, and Industry Ventures.
The company has offices in Tel Aviv and New York City and currently employs tens of people, most of whom focus on the engineering challenges at hand.
Datos is led by CEO and Founder, Uri Bettesh. Uri brings close to 20 years of experience to the table as a hi-tech executive and entrepreneur, having previously led business operations and technological implementations for multiple companies. Uri is proud that today, Datos is fully capable of managing patient-generated health data and can effectively monitor the trajectories of chronically ill individuals, giving both patients and providers a full-picture of patient health.
Bettesh previously told The Jerusalem Post, “Remote care and telemedicine solutions are helping health systems to reduce costs and improve recovery through increased engagement between patients and their care teams outside of hospital settings.
“As shown by the Ministry of Health’s actions, this can also affect positive regulatory change. However, success of such programs is dependent on developing strong partnerships between healthcare organizations and technology developers. Datos has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Prof. Klempfner and his team at Sheba. This collaboration is further evidence of how together we can bring positive change to the provision of care for the benefit of large patient populations.”
Thanks to COVID-19, the world is being propelled into the digital age at an exponential rate. It’s crucial that our healthcare providers and patients receive the support and technology necessary to ease us into this transition. Datos is the robust and intuitive telehealth platform that the health system needs to make this change easy, affordable and effective.