Wireless home-monitoring network for recuperating hospital patients

I read about an idea for a wireless home-monitoring network for recuperating hospital patients. Apparently if someone can come up with a basic prototype there’s money in VC circles available to pay for it.

Here’s the relevant snip from the article:

WHAT THEY WANT: A wireless home-monitoring network for recuperating hospital patients.

WHY IT’S SMART: No one likes extended hospital stays. Not patients, not hospitals, and not insurance companies paying bills that can exceed $5,000 a day. For the critically ill, there’s no way around lengthy visits. But thousands of other patients could be sent home early if they could be monitored at home or at a lower-cost facility. Badawi and Aslin envision a wireless transmitter that would attach to existing hardware such as portable ECG machines and heart-rate and blood-pressure monitors. The device would send data through a wireless router to a cluster of back-office servers. The servers would function like a call center, routing a patient’s vital signs to the right nursing station or on-call physician. Trimming just two days off the typical 10-day hospital stay for stroke victims would be a service worth $2.7 billion.

WHAT HE WANTS FROM YOU: Between you and a partner, you’ll need expertise in medical device technology and database management to get a working demo ready to pitch to HMOs or insurance companies. Half a million dollars in seed money should be sufficient to get that far. “It’s not the technology, it’s the complexity of navigating the health-care system that’s going to be difficult,” Badawi says. If you can sign up an HMO to test the system, 3i promises $7.5 million more to bring it to market.

Anybody think this idea has a great deal of value? I know many of my readers are CIOs and technologists within healthcare and healthplan providers. Specifically, if the service were available, would you purchase it? What would it be worth?

Comment here or [drop me an email][2] if you’d rather be anonymous.

[2]: mailto:shahid@shah.org?subject=Home monitoring