NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BaseHealth has launched a new version of its health management platform, dubbed BaseHealth Enterprise, that is designed to help medical centers and health plan providers provide personalized health assessments to their patients.
Last year, BaseHealth launched Genophen, a software-as-a-service platform that used a combination of genomic, clinical, family history, and lifestyle information to assess patients' risk of developing more than 40 complex diseases, including cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes. These risk assessments — which are backed by information that the company curates from peer reviewed publications and scientific journals — enable physicians to intervene early and where necessary recommend behavioral modification strategies to reduce disease risk and improve long-term health.
Initially, BaseHealth focused on marketing its system to smaller individual medical practices, inking deals with concierge medicine networks such as MDVIP. Genophen provided something of a surrogate system for these clients who generally don't have internal EHR systems, according to BaseHealth CEO Prakash Menon.
However, there was a lot of demand for Genophen coming from regional health centers who wanted to incorporate its assessments into their patients' records but didn't want to install a separate system from their EHRs and then have to train their doctors to use it, Menon told GenomeWeb. There was also interest in BaseHealth's offering coming from health plan providers who saw its personalized health assessments as a way to differentiate themselves from competing offers in the marketplace, he added.
Sensing an opportunity to tap into a new market, the company developed and launched BaseHealth Enterprise, which has the same capabilities as its predecessor but is designed to be integrated with existing electronic health record, hospital, and laboratory management systems already in place at customer sites rather than used as a separate system, Menon explained. It continues to offer the Genophen SaaS and to support customers that use the system in their practices.
To implement its new enterprise solution, BaseHealth works with each medical center individually and the vendors of their respective EHR and similar systems to handle any licensing issues and to perform the actual technological integration, which varies to some extent between EHR systems. When the integration is complete, hospitals will able to pull patient health assessments and risk factor information provided by BaseHealth directly into their EHRs and view it alongside the patient's existing medical records.
Like Genophen, BaseHealth Enterprise's assessments are based on information contained in patients' medical records including the results of lab work and genetic tests where available; as well as data from wearable devices such as Fitbits. Other features in the new system include a HIPAA-compliant cloud-based repository for health data storage and aggregation, a healthcare provider portal for tracking patient population metrics and progress, and tools for analyzing trends and tracking patients' progress against wellbeing goals. Patients are also able to access these assessments through their existing accounts to the hospital's system.
The amount of work required to integrate the systems is one of the factors that determines the cost to patients for access to their assessment results — about $9.75 per patient per month, Menon said. That cost also factors in the number of patients that are assessed using the BaseHealth platform, he added. There may be additional costs to the patients from products and services that the medical centers and health plans provide that incorporate the BaseHealth assessments.
The company already has its first customer for BaseHealth Enterprise and is currently in final negotiations with other yet-to-be-named customers. Its first customer is Labco, a French medical diagnostics firm, which is implementing BaseHealth within its lab management infrastructure and planning to roll out the new capability to its network of 50,000 referring physicians and as many as 25 million patients over the next five years, according to BaseHealth. Specifically, Labco is integrating BaseHealth Enterprise with its lab management system so that the latter can incorporate the results of lab tests into its health assessments. BaseHealth will also be integrated with a second Labco system used to provide test results so that patients and physicians can view the personalized health assessment alongside the results, Menon said.
In addition to moving into a new market, BaseHealth has made several updates to its system since the launch of Genophen last April, based at least in part on a beta project run last year that involved about 50 physicians and over 500 patients. In addition to changes to its platform's user interface, BaseHealth has added new datasets on drug efficacy, nutrigenetics, and drug responses to its system, Hossein Fakhrai-Rad, the firm's founder and chief scientific officer, told GenomeWeb.
The company also added a new trending tool, which lets patients and physicians explore associations between their risk factors and diseases and the impacts of these risk factors, and it has also integrated its system with other wearable device brands, he said. Another new feature is a new so-called BaseHealth score that is calculated based on a patient's current health profile and associated risk factors — the score improves over time as patients take steps to improve their health and reduce risk. The company also plans to add to the list of 40 diseases that the BaseHealth system currently provides risk assessments for, Fakhrai-Rad said.