Intel : New Application Software Platform to Help Health Care Providers Reduce Hospital Readmissions and Lower Costs

Intel today announced the launch of the Intel® Health Application Platform (Intel® HAP), an innovative application software platform that can be used by remote care solution providers to enable a variety of remote health care usage models. Remote patient care encompasses a variety of care modalities that are provided to a patient outside of a clinical setting. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a huge boon to the health care industry, and remote care is one of the biggest breakthrough advancements in modern health care delivery. Managing patients with serious or chronic conditions with remote care has been shown to reduce hospital admissions by 40 percent and readmission rates by 75 percent, and lower U.S. employer health care costs by as much as $6 billion annually.

Despite proven potential, remote care adoption still faces challenges. Today, for example, patients are able check their blood pressure or glucose level from home via their smartphones or tablets and send it to their health care providers for periodic evaluation. While more convenient for patients, general-purpose consumer devices, and even connected devices created for a specific health care usage, can become unstable or unreliable as operating systems or applications are updated. Health care solution providers, hospitals and physicians also grapple with incompatible technologies, stringent regulatory and compliance guidelines, issues of data security and privacy, and pressure to reduce costs.

The Intel HAP addresses these critical issues for adoption of remote care by enabling health care solution providers to securely deliver a wide variety of services across an always-connected and ever-expanding health care edge, and to any cloud. To make the Intel HAP platform readily available to solution providers, Intel has collaborated with Flex - the Sketch-to-Scale™ solutions provider that designs and builds Intelligent Products for a Connected World™.

Flex collaborated with Intel to create an IoT compute engine offering an intelligent, connected edge device that provides wireless connectivity to verified peripherals like blood pressure and glucose monitors, pulse oximeters, weight scales and more. This innovative solution will enable health care solution providers to bring transformative remote care solutions to market.

Once configured by the health care solution provider, solutions based on the IoT compute engine can work right out of the box. After receipt from their care provider, the equipment can simply be plugged in by patients and their families to get it up and running. Its interactive and intuitive user interface automatically displays a notice so users know when the battery needs charging. A bright light on the device confirms that data is being transmitted, allowing for hands-free use by users. The solution ensures data security both at the hardware and software levels. Additionally, hospitals and physicians will be able to retain ownership of the data that can be stored in and accessed through legacy infrastructure with their own compliance processes in place.

Intel is pursuing many efforts in the health care space, ranging from the IoT edge to the data center and cloud. By focusing on better management and use of data, Intel is helping the health care industry improve care cost, quality and access by delivering care that is more personal, distributed and collaborative. Perhaps like no other, the health care industry can benefit from better use of data to address a myriad of challenges - from an aging population and rising costs to outdated infrastructure and incompatible technologies and protocols. Intel can uniquely help this market overcome these challenges by providing not only data expertise but also by being a catalyst for better solutions, policy and standards development.

More: Learn more about Intel HAP on Intel.com. Additionally, Jonathan Ballon, vice president and general manager of the Intel IoT Group, will be speaking about the disruptive nature of remote care and the need for its adoption as a new standard of care during his keynote at the Connected Health Conference on Oct. 26. He will be accompanied by Dr. Clayton Christensen, professor at the Harvard Business School and world's foremost authority on disruptive innovations. For more details about Intel's participation at the conference visit the Connected Health Conference website.

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