The Future of Respiratory Care Has Arrived
Overview
Cohero is an engaging digital health management platform for asthma and COPD — consisting of connected devices and apps — that improves patient outcomes by increasing medication adherence, providing stats on lung function and environmental triggers, and enhancing clinician decision-making. Integral to it all: a brilliant design and beautiful user interface.
Leadership Profile
CEO Joe Condurso’s 20+ years of health operations experience includes periods as a VP at Motorola Healthcare Group and Cardinal Health. Melissa Manice, PhD, MPH, co-founder and chief scientific officer, has a PhD in clinical research with a focus in biostatistics and chronic disease.
Use Case
Tim has been on asthma medication for two years. Tim estimated that he forgot to take his medication about 50% of the time. Tim reports he has been hospitalized overnight for his asthma five times in the last 12 months and been to the ER five times in the last year due to asthma. Tim received the Cohero Health HeroTracker Bluetooth-paired medication monitoring device for his Controller medication. The BreatheSmart mobile application was loaded onto his mom’s cell phone. Text message reminders were sent through the mobile application twice a day, each day to remind Tim to take his medication on time. When Tim came in for his follow up visit three months later, he no longer felt it was hard to remember to take his inhaler. He had zero ER visits and zero hospitalizations due to Asthma over the period (compared to an average of 1.2/quarter prior to the study).
Proprietary Tech
Cohero Health’s devices are FDA Class I and Class II cleared asthma and COPD digital health products.
Feature Set
Cohero Health’s platform has multiple elements. The BreatheSmart mobile application offers a wealth of information on respiratory health and is tailored to the user. It has patient and clinician views in addition to a caregiver version, used by parents for young children or adults for aging parents or relatives. The platform offers population health risk profiling in respiratory health and predictive therapeutic insights. The HeroTracker sleeve for inhaler medications gathers stats on medication usage, while Cohero Health’s mSpirometer allows for clinical-grade lung function tests at home (or out). The platform gathers Electronic Patient Reported Outcomes (e-Pros), and it features responsive messaging, reminders, and alerts, in addition to tracking symptoms and triggers as they correlate to a real-time environmental data feed.
Key Stats
Cohero Health’s platform has clinically proven outcomes: it shows a 2.5x increase in adherence to medication over standard of care, with average patient adherence at 85% — above therapeutically optimal levels — and a 95% reduction in rescue medication use, meaning that the respiratory condition is under control. Patients using it have a 50% average reduction in emergency department visits. 92% average patient satisfaction score.
Milestone Partner
Dartmouth-Hitchcock led Cohero Health to evolve its business model. The hospital’s administration preferred to build its own chronic disease management software platform and integrate Cohero Health’s HeroTracker hardware devices into it. That led Cohero to retool its platform so it would support back-end data integration into a client’s existing chronic disease management platform; yet the front-end would remain Cohero Health’s patient-facing mobile app, BreatheSmart.
2018 Milestones
- Validated outcomes for both adult and pediatric patients. Introduced a new application dashboard for care managers, providers, and population health managers.
- Rolled out a new module — called “Symptoms and Triggers” — that allows a patient to identify triggers that cause respiratory exacerbations and features real-time weather, environmental and location-tracking data feeds designed to help prevent attacks.
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