Not only does Reliq Health Technologies Inc. (RHT:TSX.V; RQHTF:OTCQB; A2AJTB:WKN) continue to add innovative and advanced virtual care solutions for community-based healthcare—care outside the hospital setting—it also is growing the network of providers using its technology.
COVID has changed the healthcare landscape. "The pandemic has certainly accelerated the adoption of virtual care technology by over a decade," Dr. Lisa Crossley, CEO of Reliq Health Technologies, told Streetwise Reports. "Medicare and Medicaid have validated that using virtual care technologies prevents patients from going into hospital or going into the ER and therefore significantly reduces the cost of care for these patients. We're at a point now where there's a lot of market pull for our platform."
"This is really going to be the breakout year for us," Dr. Crossley added.
She noted that the company hadn't had a lot of interest from skilled nursing facilities prior to the pandemic, but "now they are one of our most rapidly growing segments. Their business was hard hit by the pandemic, but transitional care, remote monitoring and remote annual wellness visits are new revenue streams for them and a way to maintain some continuity of care, without having patients in a residential setting where the risk of catching COVID is so high."
More than 37 million Medicare and Medicaid patients have two or more chronic diseases, Dr. Crossley noted. "That's a $100 billion market for us right there." The company is also getting interest from private insurers.
The company just added a care management network in California with 50 clinics and over 500 physicians. "The network delivers culturally customized, technology-enabled health care to senior citizens in the Asian-American community across California," the company advised.
"We are very pleased to be expanding on the West Coast, and in particular to be leveraging our customizable, multilingual iUGO Care and iUGO Home solutions to meet the needs of Medicare, Medicaid and privately insured patients in the Asian-American community in California," said Dr. Crossley.
"Using our highly scalable iUGO Care platform, physicians serving this community will be able to manage complex patients in their own homes and in their preferred language, offering multilingual Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), Chronic Care Management (CCM) and Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) services," Dr. Crossley explained.
"iUGO Care allows complex patients to receive high quality care at home, improving health outcomes, enhancing quality of life for patients and families and reducing the cost of care delivery," the company stated. Remote patient monitoring allows people to monitor their health status anywhere using medical devices, and the system notifies the care team if a patient's condition starts to deteriorate.
"With iUGO Home, case managers in the network can support seniors aging in place, allowing them to live safely and independently by providing multilingual personal emergency response services, fall detection, medication reminders and geofencing," Dr. Crossley said. The company expects to begin onboarding patients in California in March, with revenue averaging US$40/patient/month.
Reliq's iUGO Home system uses a wearable device, either a watch or a pendant, that connects a patient with its care team. The system facilitates two-way audio communication, fall detection, medication reminders and fencing alerts if the patient wanders beyond a defined area. The device connects either by cellular or Wi-Fi, and also connects with Bluetooth-enabled medical devices that the patient is using.
The company signed its first contract for iUGO Home at the end of January, with a long-term care facility in Texas that will supply iUGO Home to its patients, and expects to add 3,000 iUGO Home patients in North Texas this year. The average revenue is expected to be $30 USD per patient per month. "Many of these patients will also be using other iUGO Care products including Remote Patient Monitoring, Chronic Care Management, Transitional Care Management and Behavioral Health Integration, with an average additional revenue per patient of $40 USD/patient/month," the company stated.
Reliq has also launched iUGO Well to address people's physical and mental needs. In October, Reliq announced an agreement with the University of Notre Dame Australia, a school with 12,000 students. "iUGO Well is a digital health solution that delivers preventative health and wellbeing programs via mobile and web applications," the company explained. "With iUGO Well," Dr. Crossley explained, "we're mostly focusing on the university students, although also on the faculty and staff, looking at reducing stress in general and making positive lifestyle changes. Australia is a really good market for that kind of product, because the government actually penalizes employers if they have employees who are either hospitalized for a mental health conditions if it's related to stress at work, or if they committed suicide."
"Just this year we are working in new geographies, we've got new technologies that are allowing us to access different patient populations, so we are diversified geographically as well as in our product lines," Dr. Crossley concluded. "We are ramping up the first half of this year, and we expect to see truly explosive growth the second half of the year as COVID vaccinations alleviate a lot of the acute, urgent demands on our clients, and allow them to focus on more proactive approaches to care."
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