ACTIVATE by Health Tequity

Health Tequity, LLC

ACTIVATE by Health Tequity

ACTIVATE integrates remote patient monitoring, wearables, & sensors into seamless chronic care management to improve self-management & health outcomes

Berkeley, CA, USA

United States

For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models

Globally, chronic diseases are major and sometimes silent killers and the greatest contributors to healthcare costs. In the US, there are 116 million people with hypertension, 37 million with diabetes, and 96 million with prediabeties. Medically underserved populations including rural, low-income, and racially/ethnically minoritized populations experience greater prevalence and mortality in diabetes and hypertension. Uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes are related to heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and cognitive decline. Chronic illness is hard to control. First, people may not know they have the condition since symptoms aren’t obvious until disease is advanced. They must be screened regularly. Second, controlling the condition means paying attention to daily lifestyle practices, like healthy diet, regular exercise, managing stress, and taking medications. Behaviors are notoriously hard to change without effective support programs. Third, remote monitoring and care coordination solutions which have shown promise in research have not been widely adopted in primary care settings. Community and rural health programs are under-resourced and often don’t have the technology infrastructure or staffing to implement these evidence-based programs. Barriers persist for underserved and minority populations including health device access, digital health literacy, clinic staff and providers with digital experience, and programs adapted to culture and setting.

ACTIVATE is a flexible and privacy-compliant cloud platform for digital care coordination and remote patient monitoring. We connect a wide variety of commercially-available bluetooth or cellular devices for remote patient monitoring, smart home devices, or other sensors, and integrate the data with electronic health records to create a view of the whole person. This valuable dataset can be analyzed to streamline workflow, engage in shared decision-making with patients and caregivers, and deliver health outcomes. The platform includes a library of operating system-agnostic device integrations, organization dashboards with actionable insights, mobile application for patients to manage their own data and patterns, and data integration with electronic health records (EHRs). A key feature is the ACTIVATE optimization toolkit which supports efficient implementation, workflow improvements, chronic care program planning, and digital health literacy resources that make the solution feasible in low-resource settings. While initially demonstrated in diabetes and hypertension with validated health outcomes, ACTIVATE can support any health condition. A video outlining our product can be found here: https://youtu.be/qQ0oL5hVqb4

We help community-based organizations through digital health innovation and a unique co-design approach. Our customers are community health and rural health centers that supply care to all people regardless of ability to pay and are the providers of primary and preventive care for those who are medically-underserved, such low-income, racial and ethnically minoritized, and rural residents. In 2023, we conducted an IRB-approved interview study with 25 healthcare leaders from rural and community settings to understand the needs and challenges (unpublished). Interviews confirmed the need for remote patient monitoring (RPM) and care coordination across many health conditions with the goals of reducing total costs of care and improving patient outcomes. Unfortunately, communities in rural and medically underserved areas are at a disadvantage. As one interviewee said, “…it’s the healthy and wealthy that are the biggest users of RPM services.” In 2021-2023, we conducted four pilots in rural California including 400 low-income and uninsured, and majority Spanish-speaking patients, demonstrating substantial improvements in both diabetes and hypertension with the majority of patients achieving control within 6 months (published). With ACTIVATE we enhanced the capacity of these clinics and brought essential digital health technology and digital literacy resources to their patients demonstrating real-world outcomes.