We came across an article entitled 6 Apps That Can Reduce Readmissions and decided to do you two better.  There's a great deal of interest and development in the "readmissions avoidance" space and many different approaches.  Ours is focused on care providers like home health agencies or departments on aging.  We'll tell you more about it below, but let's first look at other approaches to care transition apps.

8 Apps That Can Reduce Readmissions

Here are the 6 from the article at www.healthitoutcomes.com:

• Propeller Health’tracks inhaler use for COPD and Athsma patients
• SeamlessMD has a mobile app for tracking temperature and pain (two potiential signs of surgery complications)
• GetWellNetwork brings disease specific information to many patient locations
• CareAtHand is especially cool and we know the founder, Dr. Andre Ostrovsky.  His app tracks home health aide data to predict potential admissions.
• Vocera Care Experience puts patient care plans into audio and video
• HealthPatch MD tracks vital signs and detects falls

We'd encourage you to read the full article to learn more about these apps.

Two Bonus Apps That Can Reduce Readmissions

While we weren't chosen by the author of the original article, we've got two more readmission apps to recommend:

• iGetBetter: offers a patient centric application for adhering to a care plan.  There are two key differentiators for iGetBetter: 1) They have a care plan configurator that makes them flexible enough to handle many disease states (so you can use iGetBetter to provide the functionality of the 1st, second and last apps listed above, and maybe even the third), and 2) They have a staff physician, Dr. David Lebudzinski, who can configure the care plans for you.
• Ankota (that's us by the way) enables post acute providers to manage care transitions.  You can watch our video for a two minute overview. In a nutshell, the functionality is as follows:
  • Accepts electronic referrals including portable electronic health records (EHR)
  • Gives referral sources visibility into their referred patients in a HIPAA compliant way (e.g., the referring hospital can see their referred patients, but nobody elses).
  • Enables intake personnel to easily accept the referral, match a care provider, and schedule the care transition episode
  • Includes clinical notes based on evidence based best practice (you can use the out-of-the-box notes or customize them).
  • Clinical documentation can be filled in on a tablet (like iPad or Android) and does NOT require Internet access at the point of care
  • Tracks avoided readmissions (by patient, referral source and primary diagnosis)
  • Includes billing and payroll calculations

Sometimes in demos we get the feedback that "your app is great, but it's not what we're looking for," if Ankota is not what you need, perhaps one of the other 7 in this article can help you.

Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Reeadmisison avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.