In the United States, approximately 6 million patients suffer from Alzheimer’s dementia. This number is only going to grow in the future. Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of death in the United States, and out of the top causes of death, is the only one that cannot be prevented. Complicating the course of Alzheimer’s dementia in hospitalized patients is superimposed delirium, which is frequently missed by the care teams. Inouye et al. (2014), in their landmark LANCET study, were able to add a financial cost to this diagnosis and reported an estimated loss of $160 billion per year. A significant fraction of that lost revenue comes from patient’s prolonged stay in the hospital due to delirium and its complications. Each additional hospital day beyond the expected length of stay (defined by Medicare and commercial payers using the Diagnosis Related Group bundled payment methodology), adds to the hospital financial losses.
50 million people suffered from Alzheimer’s dementia worldwide in 2017. A new person develops dementia every 3 seconds. In general, the population that can benefit from SeVA platform is huge, is growing, and threatens to drain the financial resources for both developed and developing countries. Beyond Alzheimer’s dementia, SeVA can also be utilized for delirium prevention in all hospitalized patients. In 2016, according to Center for Disease Control (CDC), an estimated 35 Million patients were hospitalized. Based on studies, one in every five patients in the hospital develops delirium, leading to an increased length of stay anywhere between 2-5 days. With these numbers in mind, SeVA has a cumulative potential of impacting and improving care for 7 million hospitalized patients each year in the United States, decrease cumulative hospital length of stay by 14 million – 35 million patient days and therefore, have an enormous financial impact for both Healthcare systems and payers like Medicare. Average cost per hospital day in the United States is $2,346. As such cumulative cost-saving potential for SeVA is anywhere between $ 32 Billion to $ 80 Billion.
SeVA brings value by optimizing nursing workload. Nurses in acute care facilities (Hospitals, SNFs, IRFs, etc.) perform many cyclical tasks at regular intervals for continuous patient monitoring. These tasks include activities like checking on the patient frequently for toileting questions, delirium detection, etc. In addition, the nurses also provide a personal touch to patients by talking to them about their day, concerns, etc. However, even with this intense schedule, the patient still has windows of “unsupervised care”, with no direct observation. These windows of unsupervised care lead to adverse events like falls. For delirious/Alzheimer’s dementia patients, with an inability to use the nursing call light, basic needs like water, bathroom trips go unaddressed. SeVA has the capability to provide a meaningful bi-directional and medically oriented conversation with the patient. This can decrease the cyclical checks the nurses perform. For example, instead of the nurse checking on the patient every hour for bathroom needs, SeVA can auto-activate to ask this question every hour. The AEI technology in SeVA analyzes the answer and directs the patient’s needs to the nursing staff and improving the workflow related to cyclical checks. With further developments and upgrades, SeVa will be able to document this encounter in the EHR, thus eliminating both nursing charting time and also recording accurate patient events.
HELP has been shown to improve cost related to delirium in hospitalized patients. Study done involving 7000 patients per year on 6 hospital units resulted in annual savings of $6.9 million. For patients above the age of 65,
For Health Systems, nursing time optimization has been a challenge. Each nurse on an average cares for 4-5 patients per shift. An hourly check protocol can take up to 5 minutes which can translate to 20-25 minutes every hour of nursing time. SeVA can decrease nursing workload by performing these monotonous tasks accurately and consistently every hour, therefore providing precious minutes to the nurse for more actionable care, thereby increasing both patient and nurse employee satisfaction.
