knownwell CEO Brooke Boyarsky Pratt

Digital Health

PHTI Delivers Mixed Review on Digital Hypertension Tools

Digital hypertension management solutions received a mixed report card from the Peterson Health Technology Institute’s latest evaluation, which found significant differences in performance depending on the treatment approach.

The 71-page report assessed clinical and economic evidence across three solution types:

• Blood Pressure Monitoring – extend hypertension care beyond in-person visits using home monitoring devices that stream data back to providers. Ex. AMC Health, Health Recovery Solutions, VitalSight (Omron)

• Medication Management – employ dedicated virtual care teams to coordinate medication adjustments as a supplement to the patients’ main primary care team. Ex. Cadence, Ochsner Digital Medicine, Story Health

• Behavior Change – deliver educational content, alerts, reminders, and virtual interactions with coaches or care teams to improve hypertension self-management. Ex. Dario, Hello Heart, Lark, Omada, Teladoc (Livongo).

PHTI’s signature chart delivers a great summary of the findings:

The analysis found that all approaches across all payor types increase total healthcare spending over a three-year time horizon, because the cost of the solutions exceeds the savings from improved clinical outcomes.

The good news – at least for Medication Management and Behavior Change solutions – was that improvements in blood pressure over a 10-year window reduced patients’ risk of cardiovascular disease and prevented enough deaths to justify the cost.

• PHTI found that only Medication Management solutions demonstrated significant blood pressure reductions compared to usual care, and recommended that this is the “most pressing area of integration” for most practice settings.

• BP Monitoring showed “slightly greater, but not clinically meaningful declines,” but failed to breakeven at current RPM reimbursement levels.

• Behavior Change approaches produced only “limited incremental declines,” which doesn’t support broad adoption for most patients but could still play a role for underserved populations with difficult access to usual care. 

Those findings naturally led to pushback from some of the companies named in the report. 

• Omada said that the analysis “inadequately groups companies with very different offerings” and “narrowly focuses on select clinical metrics,” while underweighting user experience and patient-reported outcomes. 

• PHTI responded to the critics by saying that “patients expect that clinically-focused digital solutions are improving their health. We can talk about competing on user experience… but we need to prove that they work.”

The Takeaway

There’s a high bar for digital solutions that need to justify their cost above standard care, and PHTI just raised that bar even higher for hypertension management. Not all approaches are created equal, and while some companies might not agree with PHTI’s findings, reports like these are a maturity milestone for digital health as a whole.

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• Francisco Partners Acquires AdvancedMD: Francisco Partners scooped up medical software company AdvancedMD for $1.1B to accelerate the expansion of its SaaS solutions within small ambulatory physician practices. AdvancedMD unifies practice management, patient engagement, revenue cycle, and an EHR within a single cloud-based platform serving 13k practices. Current AdvancedMD President Amanda Sharp is taking over as CEO after starting with the company 19 years ago as an accounts receivable clerk.

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• Health Sector Economic Indicators: Altarum’s latest Health Sector Economic Indicators showed that national health spending was up 7.2% year-over-year in August, representing 17.5% of GDP. Growth among major spending categories was highest for home healthcare at 11.6%, while hospital care grew the slowest at 6%. Home healthcare utilization jumped 10% YoY to make it the fastest-growing category – as it’s been since August 2023 – followed by physician and clinical services (6.8%), prescription drugs (6.6%), and hospital care (2.6%).

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