August 22, 2013

Aridhia and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre collaborating on patient monitoring solution

Edinburgh, UK – August 22nd, 2013 – Health and biomedical informatics company Aridhia has announced the commencement of a Phase 2 clinical trial which utilises a new patient monitoring solution that the company has developed. The system is being used for the real-time remote monitoring of outpatients with non-emergency chronic conditions, such as patients with cancer living at home while undergoing chemotherapy treatment.

In the trial, Aridhia’s patient-focused Clinical Analytics system allows patients to use an application installed on a standard Android mobile device to complete regular questionnaires, recording vital clinical parameters such as body temperature, signs of infection and numerous other common but distressing side-effects of chemotherapy treatment such as nausea and vomiting. Completed questionnaires are transmitted to a central server in real-time where they can be automatically assessed and responded to by the patients’ healthcare team at the treating hospital via the Clinical Analytics web-based application.

The current trial utilises a three-tiered ‘traffic light’ system to communicate remote patient health status. Patients experiencing no significant side effects or health issues will register on the system as ‘green’, indicating no clinical intervention is required. Patients experiencing moderate or severe side-effects will register as needing either immediate clinical intervention (red) or ‘same-day’ clinical intervention (amber) to prevent side-effects escalation. The healthcare team can then provide intervention over the phone to patients. The patient Android phone application also includes standalone self-management information for patients to reference appropriate context-driven self-care advice and a graphing function to review their symptom progress over time.

Aridhia’s CEO and Chairman, Dr David Sibbald, believes the patient controlled technology will save lives by identifying potentially fatal symptoms that patients would otherwise ignore:

“One of the key issues for cancer patients who are sent home while receiving chemotherapy is that they expect to feel ill. So, for example, when their temperature starts to rise, they think this is normal. Unfortunately, a rise in temperature could indicate a change in their condition that is potentially deadly if it is not picked up and acted upon on by their healthcare providers in a timely fashion.

“Patients who have used the technology so far have described it as a ‘guardian angel’ because it helps them to stay in contact with the hospital in real-time.”

Dr David Sibbald, Chairman and CEO of Aridhia.

Telecare is a growth area enabling patients to remain safely at home with remote monitoring by healthcare professionals. This has advantages for patients undergoing long term non-emergency treatment or chronic condition management regimens, who are able to remain in their own familiar environment with the close support of their friends and family and maintain as normal a lifestyle as possible. The advantages for the healthcare provider are that interventions and use of central resources can be targeted at those most in need, leading to improvements in both operational efficiency and quality of care.

Researchers and healthcare professionals at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne have had considerable input into the system’s design for use in its current trial of 40 haematology cancer patients across two hospitals in Melbourne. This trial is scheduled to be completed later in 2013, with a larger trial of around 250 patients within 3 hospitals and across 2 Australian states also scheduled to commence in 2013. The larger trial is to run for around 2 years in order to seek to fully establish the patient benefits of a telecare system alongside health economic analyses and potential savings to the healthcare sector. These trials focus on a group of patients being treated for lymphoma and leukaemia who are at increased risk of adverse side-effects or complications as a result of their chemotherapy treatment.

Aridhia’s patient-focused Clinical Analytics service design is not unique to patients with cancer undergoing chemotherapy and can be tailored to other healthcare situations requiring regular Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs), whether they be symptom based, biometric or more generalised feedback monitoring.

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