ALR Technologies Begins Enrolling Patients in Kansas City

Richmond, Va.-based ALR Technologies Inc. (ALRT), a chronic care medical device company, has begun a large-scale commercial deployment of Health-e-Connect, its remote disease management platform. This week, a team from ALRT and the Kansas City Metropolitan Physician Association (KCMPA) began enrolling patients with type 2 diabetes and A1c levels (A1C tests measure average blood glucose over the past two to three months) above 8 percent in a trial of the Health-e-Connect system. The enrollment is a diabetes management component of KCMPA’s Quality Improvement Plan designed to achieve lower A1c scores for some of its most challenging patients.

The goal of the program is to demonstrate the ability of Health-e-Connect to improve treatment adherence and health outcomes for patients, and enable physicians to intensively manage large populations of diabetes patients remotely.

“Remote diabetes care management is part of the future of medicine,” said Bill Smith, president of ALR Technologies. “Health-e-Connect was designed to help accountable care organizations like KCMPA coordinate patient care among primary care physicians, endocrinologists, and other specialists to improve outcomes. KCMPA is on the forefront of this wave of medical innovation.”

Health-e-Connect could also become a revenue generator for KCMPA and ALRT if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) adopts its proposed payment schedule for remote chronic care management. Under the proposed rule, physicians would be reimbursed by CMS for 20 minutes of remote chronic care management each month beginning Jan. 1, 2015. According to ALRT, Health-e-Connect is the only off-the-shelf remote chronic care solution that allows physicians, medical groups, and accountable care organizations to take full and immediate advantage of this new reimbursement without adding entirely new technological and administrative infrastructure, while at the same time, helping physicians meet their quality goals for diabetes care.

Health-e-Connect is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-cleared and HIPAA compliant technology platform to remotely monitor patient blood glucose data. ALRT’s diabetes care facilitators using Health-e-Connect will alert KCMPA physicians and nurses when a patient’s blood glucose data is out of an acceptable range. In ALRT’s clinical trial, this type of Internet-based remote monitoring was associated with a 1.2 percent reduction in A1c levels over a 6-month period, from an average of 8.8 percent to 7.6 percent. Reducing A1c is valuable to patients, physicians and insurance providers because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “In general, every percentage drop in A1c blood test results (e.g. from 8 percent to 7 percent) can reduce the risk of microvascular complications (eye, kidney and nerve diseases) by 40 percent.”

“We are excited to be working with ALR Technologies on this important project,” said Jill Watson, CEO of KCMPA. “If we are able to replicate in our patient population the A1c reductions that were exhibited in ALRT’s clinical trials, we’ll be well on our way toward achieving our goal of becoming the premier diabetes management medical group in the Midwest.”