The healthcare industry is facing a complex problem. More patients are in out-of-hospital healthcare settings than ever before, and at the same time, there is a shortage of caregivers trying to manage these patients. The patient populations being managed at home include increasing levels of chronic and age-related diseases. The net impact is that we have increasing healthcare system costs during a time of caregiver shortage that few predict will get better anytime soon, which creates a great need for new digital health solutions to close this widening gap.
These problems outlined above have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as providers and caregivers operate under constantly shifting constraints, challenging the status quo of care delivery and forcing new and innovative ways to care for patients while maintaining commercial viability.
Easy-to-use digital solutions are key to addressing these growing complexities and empowering healthcare providers to deliver better quality care to their patients, residents, and seniors more efficiently with the resources they have.
To help the healthcare industry address these challenges, ResMed recently acquired Citus Health, a digital health leader specializing in patient engagement solutions that will add value across the range of out-of-hospital care settings and disease states ResMed addresses. Citus enables real-time, secure collaboration between patients and those involved in their care, including pharmacists, nurses, billing staff, family members, and others.
While there are many patient engagement solutions in the market, none bring patients and those involved in their care together with a range of tools to enhance the patient experience, provider efficiency, and reduce the burden on clinicians and caregivers like Citus does. Citus is a natural building block as ResMed continues to strengthen its interconnected ecosystem of out-of-hospital solutions to enable a higher quality of life for patients and residents in the care setting of their choice.
The addition of Citus further fuels ResMed’s out-of-hospital SaaS ecosystem, which has grown through a series of strategic acquisitions, including Brightree, HEALTHCAREfirst, MatrixCare, Apacheta, and SnapWorx. As a result, ResMed’s SaaS ecosystem includes one of the largest datasets in the industry, with data from over 105 million lives that have moved through its out-of-hospital network. Our growing dataset provides ResMed with a unique understanding of how patients move between care settings, enabling the development of data-driven tools that help providers deliver more personalized care, measurable improvements in efficiency, and better overall health outcomes.
ResMed continues to look for opportunities to enhance the value of its out-of-hospital SaaS portfolio with best-of-breed strategic acquisitions and partnerships, and the development of innovative solutions, features, and capabilities. Like many of us across the healthcare industry, our ultimate goal is to improve patients’ quality of life by streamlining and sharing information between providers.
As more organizations allocate resources and invest in solutions to aid in their care coordination efforts, interoperable SaaS solutions will be key to saving clinician and caregiver time, reduce patient management costs, keep families informed and engaged with their loved ones’ health, and ultimately optimize patients’ and residents’ health outcomes.
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