Patient monitoring used to be writing down vital stats — such as glucose levels and blood pressure — and hoping it got to the proper person.
“I worked as a nursing assistant in a facility when I was in college and we wrote down everybody’s vitals, blood glucose levels, blood pressure, on whatever little scraps of paper we could find,” Mary Pfeifer, COO at Advanced Healthcare Solutions, said. “If you were lucky, that paper got back to the nurse to get manually written into a residence chart.”
But Pfeifer and the staff at Advanced Healthcare Solutions are now using Tampa-based technology to streamline their process.
Remote patient monitoring is a technology used to monitor patients outside of clinical settings, which increases access to care. Smart Meter does this differently from its competitors by using cellular connected-data, instead of Bluetooth technology.
“Bluetooth is problematic,” said Smart Meter CEO Casey Pittock. “Physician practices were getting many technical support calls just to pair Bluetooth with the phone. Cellular does not have that problem at all, ever.”
The company’s core product is iGluclose, a cellular enabled glucometer that takes a reading from a drop of blood and transmits the information through a band of AT&T’s cellular network.
Readings go wherever they’re needed – a physician’s office, a healthcare system, or even the patient’s personal portal. This saves time for physicians and nurses and eliminates the possibility of human error.
The idea for iGlucose started back in 2012, when Smart Meter’s founder and Florida resident Ben Atkin was having trouble capturing his glucose readings.
He invented a cellular enabled glucometer, and Smart Meter was officially founded in 2016. It received FDA approval around the same time.
Smart Meter has 16 employees and several more contractors and is funded by private investors.
The company has grown significantly in recent months. Smart Meter had about 15,000 patients at the end of 2020 and now serves over 35,000. Pittock said he expects this trend to continue and anticipates 100,000 patients by early 2022.
There are several factors for this recent growth, Pittock said.
In addition to brand recognition, Medicare began reimbursing use of iGlucose — along with other patient monitoring solutions — in 2020. And Smart Meter recently launched two new products: iBloodPressure for hypertension and iScale for obesity.
“The expansion of our product line also helped raise awareness and made us even more attractive,” Pittock said.
He added physicians have seen the value of remote patient monitoring in part because of a reimbursement they receive. It is also making a difference for nurses, like in the case of Advanced Healthcare Solutions, which is rolling out iGlucose in its nursing facilities.
And though Covid-19 accelerated telehealth and remote patient monitoring exponentially, this technology will not disappear after the pandemic, she said.
“This is not going away,” Advanced Healthcare Solutions' Pfeifer said. “Cell phones are never going away. I think doctors are going to find it useful no matter where their patient is.”
