To say that healthcare has been turned on its head in the last few months is an understatement. We have seen massive adoption of virtual care on an unprecedented scale as patients shy from receiving in-person care for non-COVID conditions and as regulations around telehealth reimbursements are relaxed. By some measures, telehealth use grew eight times in just a few weeks. 

However, telehealth is only the precursor to a seismic shift in healthcare, with virtual care becoming a major component of care delivery. Virtual care delivery has numerous advantages:

Virtual care requires more than a broadband device for telehealth. Enter Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), which is essentially about the collection, transmission, evaluation, and communication of patient health data from electronic devices. The RPM market is exploding. For example, Philips recently acquired BioTelemetry, a provider of remote cardiac diagnostics and monitoring, for $2.8 billion. Dozens of RPM players are vying for a piece of the market; many provide specialized solutions (for example, Bardy Diagnostics for cardiac monitoring), others broader based monitoring (for example, Current Health). Some use AI for predicting medical events, enabling care providers to deliver pre-emptive care.

The significant premise of RPM brings into sharp focus a number of challenges:

These and other challenges point to the need for a provider that has the capability to provide home-based digital management solutions. Such a provider can take on the complex set-up, the on-going management of these solutions, technical (nonmedical) patient (and provider) support. Longer term, they have the opportunity to play a role as an aggregator that coalesces these often disaggregated solutions to provide a secure, single point of truth repository for patient data (possibly using blockchain).

Cable operators and other telecom providers with their feet on the street assets and with access to patients’ homes are well positioned to play a role in the deployment and management of these solutions and over time could develop advanced capabilities to play an even bigger role in this fast-growing market. Some operators, including Telus, are already playing in the IoMT space, which is projected to grow to $285.5 billion by 2029 from $24.4 billion in 2019, at an estimated CAGR of 28%. 

AirTies Wireless Networks has introduced the 1.0 version of a “Remote View,” a performance monitoring platform that gives cable operators and other providers a clearer view of their broadband customers’ in-home WiFi networks.

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AirTies said the platform, now available for field trials, provides deeper insight into WiFi network performance using a combo of real-time and historical data gathered across both managed devices (such as MSO-supplied gateways) and unmanaged devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones) that are hanging off the subscriber’s WiFi network. Data from the Remote View dashboard can be viewed in any browser, the company said.

AirTies, which offers partners a mesh-based WiFi platform, said those in-home networks are becoming more difficult to manage amid the growing number of mobile clients that are connecting.

“It’s getting very, very crowded,” Bulent Celebi, chairman and co-Founder of AirTies, said.

On top of that, MSOs have limited visibility into those WiFi networks, which can lead to truck rolls and calls to customer care when customers run into problems.

AirTies, which will be demonstrating at the show’s CableLabs Tek Stadium pavilion, believes its Remote View system can help by measuring the signal strength of connections between the access points and the clients. The platform stores that information locally in the access points every minute and ships that info to the cloud every ten minutes, providing operators with an updated snapshot of in-home performance and a way to visualize how traffic is travelling on the home’s mesh network.

“We’re able to provide tangible, actionable information about what’s going on in the individual house” as well as the client devices that are attached, Celebi said.

AirTies is offering remote view to its current crop of service provider customers, which includes Midco, which recently introduced a whole-home WiFi offering, as well as Sky (for its new video-optimized whole-home service), Vodafone, Singtel, and Swisscom, among others. 

Celebi said AirTies supports multiple deployment models for Remote View, including software-as-a-service (for mid-tier operators), and licensing-based options for larger providers.

AirTies is also a licensee of the Reference Design Kit (RDK), a preintegrated software stack being managed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global.  RDK started off supporting video set-tops, but has since expanded to also include data with a version called RDK-B.

Cox Communications has acquired Trapollo, a provider of managed services to the health care industry that enables the deployment of telehealth and remote health monitoring.

"We believe that the home will be an increasingly important node within the healthcare delivery architecture," said Cox executive vice president and chief strategy officer Asheesh Saksena in a statement.  "The Trapollo acquisition allows us to play a more strategic role in the deployment of healthcare technologies in the homes of patients across the country."

Trapollo is based in Sterling, Va., and designs, deploys and manages large scale nationwide telehealth and remote health monitoring programs for chronic disease management, independent living, and employer health and wellness programs. 

"Becoming a part of Cox is a unique opportunity for our company, employees and customers," said Trapollo co-founder and CEO Todd Leto.  "With Cox's long-term commitment and shared vision, we will have the resources to provide our existing and future customers with the solutions necessary to successfully design and implement effective remote health monitoring programs."

As part of the deal, Trapollo will retain its current leadership and brand.

In an  interview with Fox Business Network yesterday commenting on the Apple TV announcement, Cox CEO Patrick Esser mentioned the Trapollo deal as an extension of Cox’s connected home strategy. Trapollo provides remote monitoring services so certain patients can continue to receive care in the comfort of their own homes.

This isn’t the first health care industry move Cox has made. Earlier this year, Cox announced the formation of Vivre Health, a strategic alliance with Cleveland Clinic, and an investment in HealthSpot, a pioneer in patient and provider driven telehealth technology.