Pilot incorporates remote patient monitoring and at-home advanced wound care
Sarasota, 08 17 2020 — Florida Mobile Physicians (FMP), a Sarasota-based mobile physician practice, is taking up the challenge of the upsurge of homebound patients in the current clinical landscape. Despite the struggling economy, FMP is expanding into new modes of home-based medicine including telehealth assessment, remote patient monitoring and chronic wound care.
Although physician offices are struggling with declines in non-essential visits, as vulnerable patients remain concerned about unnecessary exposure, home health services are on the rise. The FMP practice, founded in 2014, originally focused on home-bound patients post-hospital discharge in order to prevent readmission. Over the last 6 years, FMP has slowly and steadily grown to support primary care needs in local assisted living facilities and retirement communities.
However, everything has changed since the beginning of the pandemic, as the need for more specialized and advanced care in the home setting grows. “Preventive care, combined with telehealth visits and house calls by nurses, is really the growing new normal for patients who already struggle to leave the house,” says FMP Managing Partner LaLanya Robertson. “While our business has always been about providing the best possible care in the home setting for these patients, we’ve found that the needs of patients and types of conditions have grown since the beginning of the lock down. So, we’ve grown with it.”
Two key areas that the practice is now piloting are remote patient monitoring, and advanced wound care in the home. Using telehealth company Vivify’s mobile, cloud-based platform, FMP anticipates efficiently and proactively managing the complex workflow of remote care for its patients. And to successfully manage home wound care, FMP has partnered with local medtech company Omeza, in a health economics demonstration trial.
“Too many vulnerable patients have already been lost in the system and ended up with preventable amputations. This pandemic has just magnified the problem. Now there are hundreds of folks right here in our community, with chronic wounds, who are essentially home bound. We are thrilled to be working with LaLanya Robertson and the entire FMP team on this clinical trial. We’ve already been working to develop the right products and treatment protocols to help close chronic wounds, without unnecessary excessive visits to the clinic or expensive surgical treatments. FMP is a perfect partner, at a perfect time, to show what the future of medicine might look like,” says Sarah Kitlowski, President and COO of Omeza.
For more information about the pilot study, contact Florida Mobile Physicians.
About Florida Mobile Physicians
Florida Mobile Physicians is a group practice based in Lakewood Ranch, FL. The practice provides primary care to patients living in assisted living facilities or private homes. All Florida Mobile Physicians patients are homebound due to chronic conditions and are in need of preventative medical services and support.
