Boston Medical Center is remotely monitoring new mothers for conditions like postpartum hypertension to keep the women well and out of the hospital.
The academic medical center employs the Rimidi care management platform, part of Epic's app store.
"As a safety-net hospital, many of our patients are underinsured and have social determinants that impact their healthcare, and monitoring postpartum [blood pressure] through in-person visits can be challenging due to barriers in care access," said Christina Yarrington, MD, director of labor and delivery and the division director for maternal-fetal medicine at Boston Medical Center, in a joint Aug. 30 news release with Rimidi.
"Leveraging Rimidi and the connected blood pressure cuffs, which run on local cellular networks, our program has been able to significantly increase the number of BP measurements taken in the six weeks following delivery, a crucial component to proactively preventing adverse outcomes like heart attack and stroke."
Researchers from the medical center had published their initial findings earlier this year in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
The hospital is expanding the program to monitor for gestational hypertension, via cellular blood pressure cuffs, and gestational diabetes, through cellular glucometers.
"Postpartum hypertension is a leading cause of hospital readmissions for postpartum patients, particularly for patients with social determinants that impact their healthcare," stated Lucienne Ide, MD, PhD, founder and CEO of Rimidi. "It's our responsibility to ensure that we provide healthcare systems with the tools they need to improve care for all patients, regardless of socioeconomic status."