By Kristin Rowan, Editor

Care at home has expanded in the last twenty years to include care that was previously received in hospitals, SNFs, and therapy centers. As care at home is increasingly recognized as a more cost efficient way to provide care with better outcomes and lower rehospitalization rates, we can expect more services to be offered in the home. We recently received report of one such expansion with the announcement that Constant Therapy and Elara Caring have partnered to offer speech-language and cognitive therapy support in the home.

Delivery of Care

Constant Therapy is a personal assistant for the therapist to provide more care to more patients. It also has a time saving component. Constant Therapy automates all of the documentation and home exercise programs a therapist has to keep up with, in addition to providing updates to physicians.

Mobile App

The patient app can include family members who can log in to track their loved one’s progress. The app also includes RPM to track whether the patient is adhering to the homework assignment. The app tracks how long the patient spends on a task, how many tasks are completed, and progress over time. Additionally, the therapist app can link multiple clinicians, caregivers, physicians, and hospitals to increase continuity of care.

Direct and Indirect Care Sessions

During a care session, Constant Therapy acts as a digital workbook. The workbook is used to standardize delivery of care and objectively measure progress. Outside of direct care appointments, the app acts as a homework tool for the patients. It provides assignments for continued progress when the therapist is not present.

About Elara Caring

Elara Caring is a home health agency that operates in 17 states and has 200 locations. They offer skilled home health, hospice, personal care services, behavioral health, and palliative care.  Elara’s mission is to expand home care access by embracing the industry’s most innovative technologies and models. They strive to hire compassionate people who believe in taking care of their patients, clients, care providers, and each other.

From the Source

Mark Salley

VP of Innovation and Rehabilitation at Elara Caring said, “Since our inception, Elara Caring has utilized patient data insights – more than 120M data points annually, in fact – to drive our strategic decisions that improve quality care and patient outcomes.  This has brought us to Constant Therapy. They have similar values and a shared goal to incorporate data into their evidenced-based, treatment platform. With Constant Therapy, our patients are seeing quicker recovery of speech, cognitive function, and language deficits following healthcare incidents including stroke, TBI, dementia, and more. We are excited to start this new chapter in close partnership with Constant Therapy. This will be a gamechanger for our patients and clinicians.”

Noah Poskanzer

Director of National Accounts at Constant Therapy said, “Part of being a home health clinician is to set the patient up to be as successful at home as possible. Not just in the U.S., but around the world, the number of people trained to provide therapy are [sic] going down but the number of people needing therapy is going up. Constant Therapy is providing patients with additional therapy when therapists are not present in the home with their patients.”

Constant Therapy Pilot Program

Prior to the full-scale partnership, Constant Therapy and Elara Caring launched a pilot program in June of 2023 with 115 patients across three markets. The results of that pilot program include:

• Increased Time Savings
  • 10-15 minutes per patient session
  • 60-90 minutes per day for a clinician with a six-patient caseload
• Increase Patient Access
  • 115 patients performed 92,000 additional exercises independently at home
• Improved Patient Outcomes*
  • 17% average increase in task accuracy
  • 54% improvement in task processing speed (latency percentile)*

*Patient outcomes calculated using Constant Therapy task performance

As Constant Therapy expands to include more agencies and more patients, they expect to continue to see improved patient outcomes, better access to care, and the ability to serve more patients. We will continue monitoring their progress.

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Kristin Rowan has been working at Healthcare at Home: The Rowan Report since 2008. She has a master’s degree in business administration and marketing and runs Girard Marketing Group, a multi-faceted boutique marketing firm specializing in event planning, sales, and marketing strategy. She has recently taken on the role of Editor of The Rowan Report and will add her voice to current Home Care topics as well as marketing tips for home care agencies. Connect with Kristin directly kristin@girardmarketinggroup.com or www.girardmarketinggroup.com

©2024 by The Rowan Report, Peoria, AZ. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Healthcare at Home: The Rowan Report. One copy may be printed for personal use: further reproduction by permission only. editor@therowanreport.com

Veera Anantha, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Constant Therapy. Veera is a hands-on technology executive and business leader with a passion to bring positive change through the power of data and AI. He created Constant Therapy, an award-winning mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to help tens of thousands of people living with neurological conditions regain essential life skills.Veera also successfully built a number of innovative products at other startups, including at a company acquired by Apple that developed the world’s fastest digital signal processor.

He began his career as a Lead Engineer at Motorola developing mobile software and hardware products, and later, as Vice President of Engineering at a startup acquired by Motorola, developed software products that are now used worldwide to manage wireless networks. Veera has six technology patents and recently won TiE Boston’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He is an expert mentor at MassChallenge HealthTech and Insight Data Sciences, is a Charter Member of TiE Boston, and is a guest lecturer for Entrepreneurship at Questrom School of Business. Veera holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering and a master of science degree in physics from Northwestern University, as well as a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.