The pandemic has caused many of us to rely on technology in new ways. It promotes a number of innovations, including in the field of healthcare.
For example, most patients who require regular dialysis go to clinics or hospitals, but during the pandemic, more kidney patients want to receive treatment at home.
And, as Jesús Alvarado of “Marketplace Tech” explained, new technologies may make this easier.
If you suffer from kidney failure, you need to mechanically remove excess fluid and other toxins from the blood several times a week. It is not easy, but it is getting easier.
“Sometimes this clicking sound, it’s just that the machine is starting, everything is flowing, the lines are smooth, and the treatment will start at any time,” said Liz Henry, her husband Dick’s caregiver.
For the past 15 months, Liz Henry has been helping her husband with dialysis treatment at home. They no longer need to commute to the treatment center, which takes up most of the day.
“You are locked here. Then you need to get there, you need to arrive on time. Maybe the other person hasn’t finished yet,” she said.
“There is no travel time,” Dick Henry said. “We just get up in the morning and schedule our day….’Okay, let’s do this process now.’”
She is the CEO of Outset Medical, the company that developed the dialysis machine used by Dick Henry. Connected us to this couple from the very beginning.
Trigg sees that the number of dialysis patients continues to grow. The annual treatment cost in the United States is as high as 75 billion US dollars, but the treatment and technology are backward.
“From an innovation point of view, it has been frozen by time, and its service model and equipment are mainly from the 80s and 90s,” Trigg said.
Her team developed Tablo, a home dialysis machine the size of a mini refrigerator. It includes a 15-inch filter system and a cloud-connected user interface that can provide patient data and machine maintenance checks.
“When we went to the doctor, I [said],’Well, let me take the last 10 blood pressures here for [a] three hours of treatment.’ Everything suits him.”
It took about ten years to develop Tablo and obtain approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The company declined to say how much these units cost patients and insurance companies. Last July, patients started using it at home.
“Tablo basically shook the market,” said Nieltje Gedney, executive director of the advocacy group Home Dialyzors United. Gedney is also a dialysis patient himself.
“I expect that in five years, patients will have a choice in dialysis, a choice they have never had in the past half century,” Gedney said.
According to Gedney, these machines are convenient and significant. “The time involved is critical, because for many patients, home dialysis is like a second job.”
An article published in the trade journal Managed Healthcare Executive earlier this year delved into the development of home dialysis. It has been around for decades, but the pandemic has indeed pushed more people to use it and pushed technology to make it more accessible, as Jesus said.
Speaking of accessibility, MedCity News has a story about the new rules of Medicare and Medicaid Service Centers that update payments for dialysis treatment but also create incentives for providers to increase access to family dialysis opportunities Fairness.
These types of dialysis machines may be new technology. However, the use of some relatively mature technologies for telemedicine has also increased.
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