Partners HealthCare System, the largest hospital group in Boston, is launching a startup that will commercialize a health self-monitoring system developed by Partners’ Center for Connected Health, Xconomy has learned. The planned launch of the company follows a successful pilot trial of its initial Web-based service, called SmartBeat, which allows workers to report and track their blood pressure online to improve their health.
The startup—which is expected be incorporated in the near future and is temporarily being called Connected Health—is on the hunt for a CEO to lead the nascent operation and rally support from investors, says Joseph Kvedar, a dermatologist who serves as director of the Center for Connected Health. When Kvedar last spoke to us in February, he said that Partners was considering ways to spin off SmartBeat as a for-profit service to enable its adoption nationwide. The self-monitoring system proved to be effective at helping patients control their blood pressure in a 2007 pilot trial conducted with Hopkinton, MA-based data storage and management giant EMC (NYSE:[[ticker:EMC]]), which tested the system with some 400 of its employees.
Kvedar has led efforts to commercialize SmartBeat with Doug McClure, corporate manager of technology and operations at the Center for Connected Health. “The power of connected health is starting to be more mainstream,” says Kvedar, a leading voice in efforts to enable the delivery of healthcare outside of traditional clinical settings such as hospitals and doctors offices. “We at the center are doing our best to be agile and opportunistic to respond to what could be our day in the sun—and if we don’t respond we could be very disappointed with ourselves.”
To use the self-monitoring system, people measure their blood pressure using cuffs linked their computers, which upload their readings to a server. Users can view changes in their blood pressure online, and the system provides automated messages with, say, tips on ways to keep their blood pressure down or warnings that their blood pressure is too high. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is one of the leading reasons for doctor visits, accounting for about 35.7 million visits in the U.S. annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It costs billions of dollars per year to care for hypertension patients, who are at high risk of having heart attacks, strokes, and vision loss.
Connected Health would aim to tap into a fast-growing U.S. disease-management market, which has jumped from $1 billion in 2005 to an expected
