At emocha health, we end this year with a list of accomplishments showcasing the amazing things that can be achieved when a company and its partners dedicate themselves to helping people take their medication properly every day. Here are the emocha health true medication adherence top ten highlights of 2021:
1. CMS Defines a New Digital Health Vertical with Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM) Creating New Market Opportunities for emocha
As part of the 2022 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, new billing codes for RTM provide ways for medical professionals to be compensated for continuous patient engagement. This is the first time CMS has explicitly encouraged monitoring medication adherence. emocha’s digital medication adherence program offers healthcare providers an RTM solution that can significantly improve patients’ true adherence to critical medication regimens.
2. Investors Recognize the Potential for emocha’s Best-in-Class Digital Medication Adherence Program by Investing $6.2 million in the Company
emocha closed its Series A funding round in mid-May. Financing, which was oversubscribed by investors, was led by Claritas Health Ventures. Other participants included Healthworx, the innovation and investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Kapor Capital, PTX Capital, and TCP Venture Capital. With this incredible support, “the opportunity for emocha to meaningfully change health trajectories – especially for vulnerable populations – is enormous,” said Sebastian Seiguer, CEO of emocha.
3. Journal of Asthma Publishes Study Demonstrating emocha’s Delivery of Rapid Inhaler Improvement in less than 90 days
A peer-reviewed evaluation of our asthma program, conducted with LifeBridge Health, a nonprofit community health system in Maryland, published in September 2021 showed that the median frequency of asthma inhaler technique errors among engaged patients improved from 73% in week 1 to 8% in week 2.
4. emocha makes the Digital Health 150 list
emocha was honored to be recognized by CB Insights in their 2021 ‘Digital Health 150 Ranking’ as a leader in patient engagement and digital front door programs. We also want to thank the Healthcare Technology Report for including Sebastian Seiguer in their list of Top 25 Consumer HealthTech Executives of 2021.
5. Researchers Test emocha’s Digital Medication Adherence Programs with Transplant Recipients
emocha was privileged to work with clinical leaders and researchers from Florida State University (FSU) and the University of Florida (UF) to conduct a 12-week asynchronous, mobile video DOT intervention with adolescent heart transplant recipients who were at least 6 months post-transplant and experiencing difficulties with medication adherence. Data from the FSU and UF study is expected to be released in Q1 of 2022.
6. MedStar Family Choice Shares their emocha Program Results at HIMSS 2021
We were privileged to share the stage with MedStar Family Choice, a Medicaid Managed Care Organization serving residents of Maryland, at HIMSS to discuss how our pilot program improved outcomes, quality measures, and customer satisfaction among their members with asthma. The success of these initial efforts led Medstar to increase the size of the program and offer emocha to more members with asthma and expand the program to individuals with type 2 diabetes in the last quarter of 2021.
7. COVID-19 Vaccination Tracking and Symptoms Monitoring Support Evolves and Expands
Given emocha’s long-standing involvement in helping treat and monitor infectious diseases, we have supported public and private entities to protect their workforces and communities during the pandemic. emocha has now been deployed to more than 166,000 people for vaccination tracking and symptoms monitoring. emocha also helped provide critical contact tracing and case investigation support to over 50,000 people in 2021.
8. Compliance and Security Wins at emocha
Having proven a consistent cybersecurity track record at the end of 2020, the company successfully completed our first System and Organization Controls (SOC) Type 2 audit in 2021. emocha received a no exceptions SOC 2® report on controls relevant to security for our digital medication adherence program services and systems in early December. We also look forward to kicking off our HITRUST certification in 2022.
9. emocha Team Continues to Grow
As our customer base increased in size so did the number of employees. The emocha team grew by 45% – adding engineers, health coaches, operations professionals, product managers, commercial executives, and more. We honored some of these great employees with our bi-monthly ‘emocha values in action’ social posts and had the chance to highlight one of our amazing customers in the company’s first quarterly corporate newsletter.
10. Partners in Public Health Publish New Data
Our colleagues from Johns Hopkins University and the Alameda County, California Public Health Department, published data illustrating that under routine conditions, a higher proportion of Tuberculosis (TB) treatment is verified using emocha video-Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), than with traditional in-person DOT. In addition, seven of emocha’s partners were named “CDC 2021 TB Elimination Champions” for their use of emocha’s video-enabled DOT program to help eliminate TB.
