"Smart Home" Health Care Platform Offers Glimpse Into the Future of Home Care

Home digital technologies are becoming one hot item in the news and at the national level. The drivers are: the rapid development of mobile health technology, the high cost of US health care, and the 10,000 patients reaching Medicare age each day.

No one likes being in a hospital or post acute care unit; they would be much happier at home. However, simply because someone wants to be at home, doesn’t mean it is the best place to be when complex medical care is needed.

That is where Orbita, a Boston company, comes in. Bill Rogers, a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years experience in the software industry, founded Orbita in 2015.  Bill is a veteran of a subgroup of the software industry termed customer experience management software. Previously, Bill envisioned a way that would allow anyone to easily create and edit content online and founded Ektron, a company that eventually grew to a client base of more than 3500 organizations using their solutions to create unique, personalized website experiences to their visitors accessible via any device.

Bill and his Orbita co-founders saw an opportunity to apply their expertise in building enterprise solutions that emphasize user engagement to improve the care of individuals struggling with age-related and chronic health issues at home. Just as they made it easy for business professionals to update Web content and create personalized online experiences, they envisioned Orbita as a mechanism to enable health care organizations to easily create and manage personalized home care experiences. Orbita’s principals also have first-hand experience with the challenges of caring loved ones, and seek to combine their passion for technology with a desire to enable digital home care solutions that respect the dignity of the patient and the compassion of the caregiver.

The team coupled its successful experience in web and mobile solution development with an early observation of explosive growth in the development and use of sensors in health and wellness. These sensors include the obvious ones, like wearable’s, but they go well beyond the wearable’s seen at the gyms. In health care we are seeing ingestible, implantable, invasive, and strip sensors capable of measuring and monitoring virtually any body function. In addition, there are movement sensors that can detect when homebound people have not gotten out of bed and even sensors that detect when a person has used a toilet.

Currently it is estimated that 95% of all American households have wired network access, 2 of 3 have broadband at home, and 99% of all households have access to some form of wireless network. In addition, two thirds of Americans currently own a smartphone—a key to this revolution. 

Orbita was created to help health care organizations tap this connected world by providing connected health applications that increase patient engagement, improve communication and care coordination, and reduce risk-related events at home. Orbita works with organizations with value-based care incentives, such as reducing unnecessary hospital admissions and readmissions, improving treatment, medication adherence, and overall outcomes. 

Orbita provides a secure, cloud-based platform for creating and managing digital home health care applications. It is purpose built; meaning it gathers data from a plethora of devices and uses its analytic capabilities to personalize care and provide actionable insights to the patients themselves as well as their care providers, both family and professional.

Orbita has built its system to remind people of their care schedule and notify adherence variance. They use an intelligent, rules-based engine to advise patients on the care plan. If the patient misses a treatment event, or has an event-dependent endpoint, the engine will provide reminders, send relevant educational materials, cue a video, or even notify caregivers.

In addition to supporting most major wearables and digital home health devices, Orbita has recently added support for the Amazon Echo voice platform. Through this integration, patients at home can ask questions about their care, send messages to their caregivers, check medications, and record care activities—all through an intuitive natural language interface.

The Orbita platform comes complete with pre-built mobile and web care management applications for patients and their caregivers, and a web dashboard for clinicians to track and manage a population of patients in home care. They also support custom applications where either the client or a third party does the customization with Orbita’s APIs and other customization tools. Their pricing model is a tiered, per-user-per-month fee schedule.

Orbita sees their target market as medical device companies, healthcare providers, payers and employers. Orbita is another example of how digital medicine will soon permeate our lives and those of our family members.