"With 24/7 health monitoring, the system has to be reliable. Blues is a key component enabling us to bring high quality care to cancer patients in their own home."
Rakshit Sharma, MD
CEO
Agilix Health
Overview
We’ve likely all been touched by cancer in our lifetime. This year, almost 2 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed and over 600,000 cancer deaths will occur in the United States alone. Despite how pervasive this disease is, cancer patients have traditionally been beholden to a reactive care model, burdened with monitoring and self - reporting symptoms and side effects while undergoing outpatient treatment. Powered by Blues, Agilix Health is working to redefine the model and deliver an improved quality of care for cancer patients through remote health monitoring systems. Agilix Founder and CEO Rakshit Sharma tells us why and how they came up with this technology.
The Cost of a Reactive Care Model
With outpatient cancer treatment, chemotherapy is administered in clinics or hospital oncology wards. The infusion is a chemical cocktail meant to destroy cancer cells, but also toxic and damaging to healthy cells. Patients are then sent home, where they begin to experience the side effects of treatment without healthcare provider oversight.
Some of the most common side effects experienced are nausea, fatigue and diarrhea, which can snowball into more severe issues. This usually turns into the need for emergency care, with close to 60% of patients visiting the emergency department at least once within 6 months of diagnosis. But, more than 50% of those visits are avoidable by proactive care management and monitoring.
When patients visit the emergency department, they often get admitted or they disrupt treatment. Delaying treatment time decreases the chance of survival, as the cancer continues to grow. Treatment must then be restarted later at higher doses. And with an $8,000 average cost for an emergency room visit, this also contributes to higher costs for the patient, the hospital, and the payer.
National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Exposing Gaps in Care
The pandemic has accelerated innovation and adoption of digital health technologies. Hospitals were attempting to divert as much traffic as possible from emergency departments, while members of the community in need of care avoided visits out of concern for potential COVID - 19 exposure. This is particularly true for cancer patients who are at higher risk of infections. This exposed major gaps in our current system, including the costs of reactive care models. Out of necessity, we discovered that both routine and specialized care can be decentralized and extend outside of healthcare facilities.
"One thing that the pandemic taught us is that patient care can extend beyond the four walls of a hospital."
Rakshit Sharma, MD
CEO
Agilix Health
For cancer patients, real time measures such as grip strength and lean body mass are prognostic indicators of the need for interventional care. Nutrition is a vital component of preventative care, with mortality rate reaching 90% with a 5% drop in weight. In an outpatient setting, you’re only monitoring these indicators during scheduled appointments, which leaves a lot of time for the patient’s health to degrade.
How Agilix Health is Empowering Patients
Agilix recognized the need to support patients between medical appointments through nutrition support and remote monitoring. Their platform looks at the holistic health of patients on an ongoing basis, picking up on early signals of distress that would either result in emergency department visits or disruption of treatment. With the help of the team at Blues, Agilix Health prototyped a digital grip strength meter in six weeks. The digital meter translates a patient’s health information to the cloud for analysis, empowering patients and providers with real-time data.
When considering solutions, security and ease of use for patients, ability to develop a robust product, and long-term reliability were the biggest factors for Agilix. They knew that cellular was better than WiFi for patients and found there was no competition with the embedded cellular model from Blues. The Notecard from Blues helps bring quality care to patients in the comfort of their homes. With 10 years of connectivity and 500 MB of data to transmit data securely, this allows Agilix to continue innovating.
"Blues’ embedded data plan helped us reduce our price to go to market and ultimately have a wider impact on patients who need it."
Rakshit Sharma, MD
CEO
Agilix Health
Quality and accessibility were the other major considerations for Agilix. If this was going to work, it needed to be scalable and repeatable. Working with Blues allowed them to drastically reduce costs, getting this technology into the hands of patients who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
Predicted Results
In addition to improved health outcomes for the patients, Agilix’s goal is to drastically reduce financial burdens for the entire healthcare system. “If we can reduce ER visits by 50%, this will lead to tremendous cost savings for the hospital, for the payer and for the patient,” said Rakshit. Payers have mandated that hospitals incorporate quality metrics for Oncology, and readmissions negatively impact reporting. This puts hospitals at risk of being penalized with a poor reputation among consumers and reducing the amount of funding they receive from Medicare.
Agilix’s vision is to provide ongoing objective and subjective patient monitoring, handing control back to the patient and provider by giving them access to the information necessary to make informed decisions about their health. They aim to replace the reactive care model with an adaptive care model, reducing the burden to patients and the system.
National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
How to Learn More
Powered by Blues technology, Agilix Health empowers cancer patients, making them equal participants in their treatment by virtue of the data transmitted from high quality monitoring devices for assessment. Agilix Health remote monitoring uses the Blues Notecard, for zero-configuration cellular connectivity, available now in over 130 countries. Remote monitoring devices will bring objectivity to cancer management, lowering costs and improving treatment outcomes without cancer patients having to leave their homes.
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Enterprise
Large-Scale Deployments Made Easy
Do you have an ambitious roadmap with plans to scale to 1,000 devices and beyond? Then, the Enterprise plan is for you.
The Enterprise plan includes custom pricing, centralized billing, and direct data center connectivity, giving companies complete control over their projects.
Each Enterprise plan is tailor-made with custom per-device pricing that includes attractive discounts based on device count and event volume.
Who is Enterprise Designed For?
Companies that place a premium on end-to-end data security, from Notecard’s encrypted communications to Notehub’s private data routing to your cloud application.
Those with internal controls that require centralized billing and admin-managed permissions.
Drive cost savings and data accessibility with Notehub’s 90-day event history retention and seamless integration with Amazon’s S3 Archive service.
Analyze and Scale
Actionable Intelligence for Projects at Scale
Go from insight to action with Analyze & Scale’s advanced analytics capabilities.
Projects operating at scale generate troves of valuable data, but to make sense of it, you need powerful tools at your fingertips. That’s where Analyze & Scale comes in.
Who is Analyze & Scale Designed For?
Companies looking to visualize their deployment and device locations with pinpoint accuracy while leveraging event-driven alerts to reduce downtime and promptly address fleet developments.
Drive cost savings and data accessibility with Notehub’s 90-day event history retention and seamless integration with Amazon’s S3 Archive service.
Those looking to perform in-depth project and device analysis to drive innovation and product improvement.
Develop
For Scaling Projects Looking for Enhanced Automation & Control
Notehub’s Development plan is purpose-built to accelerate your project’s journey from pilot to scale.
It’s packed with features that will make it easier to efficiently grow your project from 10s of devices to 100s.
Who is Development Designed For?
Companies looking to visualize their deployment and device locations with pinpoint accuracy while leveraging event-driven alerts to reduce downtime and promptly address fleet developments.
Drive cost savings and data accessibility with Notehub’s 90-day event history retention and seamless integration with Amazon’s
S3 Archive service.
Essentials
Only Pay for What You Use
Through Essentials, our subscription-free tier, you pay only for the data you export from Notehub to your cloud application, making it perfect for developing PoCs, piloting projects or early-stage deployments.
While Essentials provides essential data routing from device to cloud, upgrading to Development unlocks a suite of premium features designed to optimize and accelerate your deployment.
Who is Essentials Designed For?
Projects that are looking to use Notehub exclusively as a device-to-cloud data pump, and do not want to use the advanced features to optimize their deployment.
Companies who are not currently focused on using Development’s features to optimize their deployment or gain deeper insight into their devices.
Projects that are prototyping or experimenting with Blues.
Companies that at the current stage of their business are comfortable with unpredictable monthly Notehub costs.
What are Consumption Credits?
Instead of paying a monthly subscription fee to use Notehub, users of Essentials are charged based on the amount of messages they export from Notehub to their cloud applications.
Users on the Essentials plan pay to export this data by pre-purchasing Consumption Credits. A Consumption Credit is a single event of either routing a data message from Notehub to the user application or reading a data message using Nothub API. As messages are routed/read, Consumption Credits are deducted, offering a flexible pricing model based on actual usage.
What Events Consume Consumption Credits?
Here’s a breakdown of the specific events and requests that consume Consumption Credits:
Service
CC Cost
Routed Event
1 CC
Event API Retrieval Request
1 CC
Other Notehub API Requests
.001 CC
Real-time Device Messaging*
1 CC
Notecard web request*
1 CC
What is the Pricing for Consumption Credits?
Companies on the Essentials plan will receive a monthly allocation of up to 5,000CCs for free. Beyond this 5,000CC top-up, Consumption Credits can be purchased on a sliding scale based on volume: