Diabetes Programs in Montana Deploying Welldoc's BlueStar for Remote Monitoring
Chronic disease management company Welldoc has partnered with state health leaders in Montana to introduce the company’s digital health solution BlueStar to their commercial, Medicare and Medicaid populations.
In 2018, approximately 77,000 Montana adults reported having diagnosed diabetes, according to the state government. More than half of this population lives in a rural setting, making access to healthcare facilities challenging.
Welldoc is working with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, Montana Diabetes Program and the Association of Diabetes Care and Education Specialists (ADCES) Montana Coordinating Body.
The company describes BlueStar as delivering tailored, real-time feedback, and connecting users to their own care team to help optimize care. It integrates with blood glucose meters, pharmacies, labs, activity and fitness trackers, and aggregates all data points to deliver actionable insights for the user's care team. The solution allows providers to use remote patient monitoring codes for reimbursement.
The one-year program, which began in late 2019, is recruiting people with diabetes through September 2020, with the possibility of extending another year.
Participants in the program will have access to BlueStar to track critical dimensions of their health, including blood glucose, nutrition, medication adherence, blood pressure, psychosocial factors, and sleep. This data will be shared with their own care team enhancing continuity of care.
"Even as a rural state, Montana is seeing incredible advances in care delivery for people with diabetes," said Melissa House, diabetes program manager within the Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Bureau of Montana's Department of Public Health and Human Services, in a statement. "Through this partnership with Welldoc, we hope to be able to expand our telehealth delivery and offer diabetes self-management to individuals who may otherwise not receive this important service."
Columbia, Md.-based Welldoc also recently announced the expansion of an agreement with Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare). After conducting a two-year program of quality improvement research with the Ambulatory Practice of the Future at Massachusetts General Hospital, MGB decided that BlueStar will now be integrated within the electronic health record to evaluate its effectiveness at scale. BlueStar will provide clinical decision support for care teams, allowing for improved virtual access to providers whose patients enroll in the BlueStar program.
