Local company wins Governor's Technology Award for PET System

A new tool designed to give patients a voice in their health care has earned statewide kudos in the form of the 2002 Governor's Technology Award.

The Personal Empowerment Technol-ogy System was created by Rick Williams, chief executive officer of Community Hospices of America. He originally designed it for CHA to use in its care of patients facing different end-of-life issues.

Now, however, the system is being developed for other uses, and a separate company, PET Systems Inc., has been formed to handle it.

"It's a software system that runs on a common PDA personal digital assistant like a Palm Pilot and it takes over the system and becomes the primary software and allows the patient, by touching icons, to enter information about their pain, about their symptoms, the type of medications they're taking, and their emotional status, just by touching the screen," said pharmacist John Sherwood, chief executive officer of PET Systems Inc.

Williams, Sherwood and Corporate Pharmacist Rocky Levell who is the director of professional services for CHA and director of national marketing for PET plan to have the PET System available to home-health agencies, physicians and health systems by July.

Said Levell, "This is the first time that the patient has had a voice at the table. They're now sitting at the health-care table,' and they have a voice in their care. Before it was always by the nurse, the physician or whoever which is fine. That's reality. But now, they can actually have a voice in their care daily."

The technology

Williams said the PET Systems concept was visualized in 1992, but the technology for it wasn't available at that time.

In 1997, the process began to integrate the concept with the newly emerging PDA market.

He noted that doctors have suggested several groups that could be served by the PET System, including diabetics, surgery patients, deaf patients and pregnant women in their last trimesters. And because the PET System uses picture icons, it also can be used by patients who don't speak English.

Williams said now the system is designed to be controlled by a health-care provider, who would provide its own off-the-shelf technology the PDAs and then be licensed to use the PET Systems software.

"Then we provide them a system, a computer, that converts PDAs into PET devices," Williams said.

Once a day, Sherwood added, the PET device empties encrypted information onto a Web site, which can be accessed by health-care professionals in the form of health monitoring reports (HMRs).

Using collected data

Using the PET System helps patients and their caregivers get a clear picture of overall health conditions. Instead of the patient having to remember all symptoms and feelings between doctor visits, the PET allows patients to input their pain levels at different times, how they feel, and other information. The PET also reminds patients to take their medication.

Caregivers and medical providers also can put information in, and the PET keeps track of who's entering data. The PET System keeps track of the dates and times that symptoms changed. It also allows the patient to communicate with the health-care provider via e-mail about a variety of concerns.

The HMRs can provide data for a week, month or whatever period the health-care provider requests. Also, hospice providers have found that patients often will be more honest about how they feel on the PET than they will be during an in-person visit.

The best data, Levell said, is the data entered by the patient.

"In health care, who should you believe, especially when it comes to pain? The patient," he said.

Levell noted that the PET System is as easy to use as a TV remote control. Simplicity, he said, was something that focus groups requested during planning stages.

Patient feedback

Synthia Cathcart, RN, corporate educational coordinator for CHA, said hospice patients and their families appreciate the input PET enables them to have.

"It's information that they can automatically give to the hospice and the physicians," she said.

She added, "The patients that I've worked with, and nurses that I've worked with they've been very eager to give us information that would help provide better care. That's the ultimate goal."

Cathcart noted that the PET provides information just as if hospice had someone with the patient 24 hours a day, but "it's even better because it's in the patient's own words," she said. "It's not me observing someone else and interpreting for them, but rather, them reporting to us any time of the day or night a change that happens."

Interest

Levell said people want information about the PET System from him wherever he goes. Sometimes calls come in from around the world.

Interested parties from Canada, Germany and New Zealand already have contacted the company.

Receiving the governor's statewide technology award hasn't hurt either. But that's not the first large-scale award the PET System has received.

In February, the PET won the Most Innnovative Product Award from CBS' The Early Show's "Not So Crazy Ideas."

Williams noted that typically, in the 44 years the governor's technology award has been given, it has gone to one of the state's universities in Kansas City, St. Louis or Rolla.

Costs

Levell said the PET System is designed to be cost-effective, preventing higher medical costs by serving in a proactive, rather than reactive, capacity.

" We're triaging our patients before they become acutely ill," Levell said. For example, he said, if a diabetic patient was using the PET System to communicate blood sugar levels to his physician, and the physician noted unusually high readings for several days, the doctor could e-mail the patient via the PET System to arrange an office visit well before the situation would escalate into a visit to the emergency room.

As far as the actual cost of the system, the trio was quick to point out that it will cost the health-care providers not the patients less than $1 a day per PET used.

That amount, however, does not include the costs for the PETs, which are a hard cost that is depreciable.

"The reason we used off-the-shelf technology is, let's say you use this for two years, and you use it quite a bit," Williams said.

"Well, the new, later, greater version comes along. It's got fancier screens and it's cellular you can bring all those (old ones) back in, put them back into the machine that converts them from PETs back to PDAs, and now they can give the PDAs to their staff."

Other possibilities

As PET's market debut approaches, more and more applications are being found for the PET System. Another possibility for the PET, Sherwood noted, might be that insurance companies could require policyholders with long-term, ongoing illnesses to monitor their health with the PET System. Levell added that the Veterans' Administration is considering a wellness-module PET System to monitor the well-being of the nation's 26 million veterans.