Reston company jumps on the health IT bandwagon

Cindy Crump can track her mother's every move in real time even though they live miles apart. Crump knows when her mother sleeps late, if her blood pressure spikes, whether she's running a fever and what time she leaves the house.

Such close monitoring doesn't require copious phone calls or long conversations pressing for every detail of her mother's day. Instead, a plastic wristwatch developed by Crump's Reston-based company, AFrame Digital, transmits all of the information.

For Crump and the company's eight employees, the analytics and data crunching that occurs beyond the device itself tell the story of both their business and the future of health care. The system forms patterns of a patient's activity so caregivers can detect abnormalities early and initiate preventative care, she said.

"It's not just a data collection platform; you have to analyze the data and where our focus is is predictive modeling to avert crisis," Crump said.

A growing number of companies are joining five-year-old AFrame Digital in offering products that link heath care with mobile and other remote technologies in an effort to increase the quality and reduce the cost of medical treatment.

Health-care legislation made heaps of money available to digitize medical records and bolster the industry's information technology, including programs to foster innovation. That's also the topic of this week's mHealth Summit, organized for a second year by the National Institutes of Health.

AFrame Digital plans to demonstrate at the conference how the MobileCare Monitor wirelessly funnels constant health information, such as pulse, weight and blood pressure, from the watch to a private Web page that the wearer's physician, family and other caregivers can access.

The device, which also contains sensors to detect falls, and pinpoint a person's location within a house, has been initially marketed for the elderly and patients with chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer's, who want to live independently yet require regular medical oversight.

"Is a doctor really going to sit there and watch your heart rate continuously? That's not economically feasible or efficient, so by using advanced modeling technology, we're able to let the computer do that," said Bruce Wilson, the company's chief operating officer.

Though the MobileCare Monitor has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and piloted in several assisted living facilities, the broader field of "telehealth" is still being tested -- both as a method of treatment and a business model.

It's founded on the idea that in-home screening and preventative care will equate to fewer hospital visits, which can cost thousands of dollars after diagnostic tests, overnight stays and face-to-face time with physicians.

"This is all methodology right now. That's why they are going to test these out in a controlled environment," said Richard Brennan, director of the Home Care Technology Association of America. "There is a need to understand how this will save money and how will this be beneficial to the patients."

The companies themselves must also demonstrate an ability to tap this trend in a way that's appealing to investors and generates money -- goals complicated by regulatory reviews and the involvement of insurance companies.

"We're watching remote patient monitoring ... very carefully and expect there could be opportunities for attractive business and investment, but at the same time we recognize there are hurdles for viable business models to prove those companies can gain traction in the [existing] health-care delivery system," said Justin Klein, a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates.

As for AFrame Digital, the company has a backlog of 400 orders and may soon move product testing from its small Reston office to a manufacturer in Gaithersburg due to demand. The watches sell for $350 plus a $79 monthly subscription fee for home users. The price is $850 when sold as a kit with other equipment, such as wireless routers.

Crump said the company has taken on $5.4 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and angel investors. Now executives are on the hunt for an additional $2.3 million to expand the business and add features such as blood glucose monitoring and GPS technology.

"There's a lot of places we'd like to take it," she said.