Telemedicine

HomMed founder finds inspiration from personal loss
When Herschel “Buzz” Peddicord lost his grandfather to congestive heart failure, he thought it was a waste of a life. His grandfather, who was in relatively good health with the exception of the congestive heart failure, received home-care three times a week from visiting nurses. The trouble was, as Peddicord says now, his grandfather died on a day the nurse wasn’t scheduled to check on him.
“Had he had a monitoring device that he was using daily, the caregivers could have seen his condition declining — which with congestive heart failure can happen between 24 and 48 hours — and they could have responded when he needed the help rather than coming on a fixed schedule,” Peddicord said.
At the time of his grandfather’s death, Peddicord had been in the medical device industry for 27 years. He wondered why couldn’t people in their homes use those monitors daily and have a medical professional monitor them remotely? So he began doing research on home monitoring.
That was 1998.
Today, HomMed, LLC, has outsold two times the amount of its leading competitors combined over the last sixth months, according to Peddicord, the company’s president and CEO. He expects to reach $15 million in sales by the end of this year, and the telemedicine industry is expected to grow to $10 billion by 2005, making it one of the health-care industry’s fastest growing markets.
“Home-care agencies, which are suffering from a nursing shortage, now make their nurses more efficient, because instead of going to someone’s home two or three times a week, they now only go once a week and then an additional visit is based on need,” Peddicord explained. “So now they’re focusing their nurses on who needs them rather than just making visits, which has enabled them to have more time to actually take on more patients which is easing the nursing shortage somewhat.
“It also generates more revenue for the home-care agencies because more patients represent more dollars with the same staff,” Peddicord said. “So we’ve actually increased nursing efficiency by about 50%, which increases revenues by about 50%, which is not a bad thing. And the patients are happier because they get seen when they need to be seen.”
In designing the monitor, Peddicord knew it had to be easy to use to gain widespread use. The system works as follows:
The patient or patients — as the monitor can be adapted for assisted living facilities with multiple patients — has a monitor, the HomMed Sentry, at home, and their health-care providers have receiving monitors, the HomMed Observer. The Observer can monitor up to 500 patients at once. Following prompts from the Sentry, the patient checks his or her weight, blood pressure, temperature, oxygen saturation level and pulse rate, and then answers a series of predetermined questions depending on what is being monitored, from AIDS to congestive heart failure to diabetes.
The whole process takes about three minutes.
The information is automatically transmitted via regular telephone lines or wireless communication to the health-care provider’s Observer unit. There, a nurse reviews the data, compares it to vital parameters and determines if the patient needs an in-person visit. The Observer can also show a six-month rolling trend giving the health-care provider valuable information on overall change in health or a need to vary medications.
According to Peddicord, the home monitoring device is capable of speaking a host of languages, from Chinese to Russian.
It’s becoming so popular that patients and health-care providers are demanding it. Patients for the piece of mind it provides; health-care providers for better utilization of the limited resources they have.
And the cost? $5 per day per patient.
“Our perfect customer is a 40- to 50-year-old woman, who has a career, children at home and elderly parents, and she’s being pulled in all these different directions,” Peddicord says. “This (device) allows her to know that she’s doing something for mom and dad – children can keep mom and dad at home, where most people would rather be, rather than at a nursing home.”
For more information about HomMed and its home monitoring system, visit its Web site at www.hommed.com.
Oct. 12, 2001 Small Business Times, Milwaukee