Cadence CEO testifies before full House Committee on Ways & Means about access to care at home for rural and underserved communities
Chris Altchek, CEO and Founder of Cadence, testified before the full House Committee on Ways & Means during a hearing titled, “Enhancing Access to Care at Home in Rural and Underserved Communities.” The hearing was organized by Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) to examine opportunities and challenges in enhancing access to care in patients’ homes and modernizing care in rural and underserved communities.
The hearing comes as the future of several home-based and virtual care models are in flux after the end of the year when pandemic rules run out. The Committee is looking at the home-based care models and the technology that powers them, with an eye toward how they can improve access in rural areas. Remotely monitoring a patient’s biometric data is part of enabling that to happen.
Cadence is one of the nation’s leading providers of remote monitoring for patients living with chronic conditions, including heart failure, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. It currently monitors patients from home across 20 states, including nearly 12,000 patients in rural and underserved communities.
In remarks to the Committee, Altchek shared: “In our country, we have the ability to significantly mitigate the impact of chronic disease. But systemically, we struggle to implement relatively simple interventions. Heart failure patients’ lives could be prolonged by 5 years on average by adherence to the right medications. However, less than 1.5% percent of patients are even prescribed the recommended doses of these medications following hospitalizations. Our system is not set up for success. Doctors don’t have frequent enough vitals to make the appropriate change, and even if they had the vitals, they don’t have the time. Cadence’s job is to fill in the gap.”
Altchek made three recommendations focused on expanding access to RPM, encouraging the Committee to address geographic adjustments in Medicare payment that currently disincentivize RPM adoption in rural and underserved areas, work with CMS to support an appropriate national average reimbursement rates, and remove beneficiary copays for highly effective RPM services that result in savings for the Medicare program.
Other members on the witness panel included Nathan Starr, MD, Lead Hospitalist of Tele-Hospitalist Program, Castell Home Services, Intermountain Healthcare; Ateev Mehrotra, Professor of Health Care Policy and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Hospitalist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; a Home Dialysis patient; and a Hospital at Home patient.
Listen to Chris’ testimony here, and the full hearing on the Ways & Means YouTube page here.
