Reperio Health, an Oregon-based technology firm that helps patients perform health screenings and receive treatment plans without leaving their homes, recently raised $14 million to grow the business. It also is partnering with Uber on the delivery of the kits.
Uber drivers can drop off Reperio’s specialized health screening kits at patients’ homes in under an hour, according to Travis Rush, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Reperio. Once the patient has completed their assessment, an Uber driver will pick up the kit for Reperio to clean and restock the product.
The screening kits measure blood pressure, heart rate, body mass index, relative fat mass, cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose. Results are sent immediately to an app that is downloaded on patients’ smartphones.
Even with modern telehealth capabilities, health screening processes are overly complicated and drawn-out, according to Rush. Scheduling a virtual visit, making an appointment at a lab, waiting for results and getting prescribed treatment can take weeks if not months, which discourages many patients from seeking out the care they need, he said
“Either people don’t start the process at all … or they just fall out halfway through because it just gets too complicated and life happens and they don’t get it done,” Rush said in an interview with McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse. “So what we’re doing is we’re building a whole new version of that process from start to finish.
Alternatively, home health providers can use the kit as a means of simplifying patient risk assessments, he added.
“Staff can use our kit as a screening tool,” Rush said. “A kit can live in a facility or with an organization and they can send nurse practitioners to someone’s home with a kit in hand and just use it as part of their visitation.”
New service coming
Eventually, clients will be able to discuss their Reperio test results with healthcare professionals through virtual visits. Reperio plans to soon roll out a system that connects nurse practitioners with customers as soon as they complete their health screenings. The product will enable quick, data-driven treatment planning or medication prescription, Rush explained.
“This is a more modern version of a telehealth visit,” he said. “Telehealth has been great up until now; it’s just missing data. There’s no data, and without data, it’s hard to make decisions around what to do. If someone says they have headaches all the time, you can’t prescribe them blood pressure medication based on that. You need numbers, and that’s what we’re trying to make sure people have in their hands.”
