ST. PAUL, Minn. — When Bill Hill prepares to weigh himself each morning, a mechanical voice speaks to him from a small box on his nightstand that is connected to the scale on the floor.
“Ready for Health Check?” the voice asks. “Do you want to check your weight? Please step on the scale.”
As Hill, 75, steps on the scale, his weight appears 24 miles away on a computer monitor at Essentia Health in the northwestern Minnesota town of Duluth. There, registered nurse Denise Buxbaum monitors his health as part of a program that aims to keep about 300 heart failure patients out of the hospital.
For Hill, who was diagnosed with heart failure more than seven years ago, the morning weigh-in has become as routine as putting on his shoes. Like countless other patients nationwide, he’s becoming more involved in his healthcare.
That’s a major goal of the federal health care overhaul. Essentia Health has been taking care of patients like Hill with telehealth tools like the special scale since 1998. And now it is an Accountable Care Organization, or ACO. That means it takes responsibility for the health of a population of Medicare beneficiaries and can share any savings created by keeping people like Hill out of the hospital.
Taking care of people with congestive heart failure gave Essentia “both competence and confidence to move forward as an Accountable Care Organization,” says Essentia Health’s Chief Operations Officer John Smylie.
Data is key to making ACOs work. Armed with information, patients can alert doctors to potential problems early and prevent complications. If Hill’s weight goes up, a nurse or nurse practitioner will call him because heart failure patients gaining just one extra pound can signal a problem.
Something as simple as eating salt the day before can boost his weight, as it makes him retain water. Because a heart failure patient’s heart is already weakened, it can’t handle the extra fluid, which eventually can back up into the lungs.
Date: Aug 15, 2013