Livongo Health remotely monitors the most vulnerable coronavirus patients with pre-existing health conditions

Nearly 1.5 million people worldwide have contracted coronavirus. Livongo Health President Dr. Jennifer Schneider joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to address the future of healthcare as medical workers continue to tackle the virus.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Well, a lot of different companies have been attacking the coronavirus pandemic from different angles. I want to talk now about the Applied Health Signals idea. It's sort of a form of telemedicine.

Dr. Jennifer Schneider is the president of Livongo Health. She is joining us from California to talk more about what her company does.

So I know you all sort of coined this idea of Applied Health Signals, basically where there is remote health monitoring. How are you all putting it into action, and are there applications right now for monitoring people for signs of coronavirus?

JENNIFER SCHNEIDER: Thanks so much for the chance to speak. And first and foremost, our hearts go out to the people whom have lost loved ones in the setting of coronavirus, and we're incredibly grateful for the front-line workers-- doctors, nurses, some of my friends who are on the front lines-- helping in this fight.

Applied Health Signals and what we're doing at Livongo Health is an idea that we're able to remotely monitor the most vulnerable patients-- people living with diabetes, high blood pressure, behavioral health conditions. And we're able to do this through our unique ability to capture data seamlessly.

So our devices are cellular enabled. So wherever you are, safely in your home you can check your blood glucose or blood pressure or get on a scale, and we're able to remotely monitor that, upload that to the cloud, and then perform some data science so we can give very specific recommendations directly back to the individual person living with the chronic condition.

In the setting of coronavirus, that allows this vulnerable population to stay healthy, to stay home, and to stay out of the areas of infection. We know recently published from the CDC that greater than 78% of all people in the ICU with coronavirus had an underlying health condition, one of these chronic conditions. So this is especially relevant in this time.

DAN HOWLEY: Doctor, I want to ask what real impact is there on folks who are diabetic or do have pre-existing health problems? I know that that's something that goes a lot into how you react to any kind of disease. But in this particular case, are you seeing anything that would point to this being worse than others?

JENNIFER SCHNEIDER: So we know that people with diabetes, high blood pressure are no more likely to contract coronavirus. However, when they're infected, they have higher rates of mortality. We also know that these people living with chronic conditions, the severe isolation is doubly difficult for them because not only are they unable to exercise, have increased stress, but they're likely eating much more pasta. Most of us are doing that right, the COVID-19, if you will, in terms of putting on extra weight.

And so what we've seen from our member population is a 10% increase across the platform of conditions for which we're monitoring our members as well as a twofold increase in number of members who are tagging that they're stressed. When you check your blood glucose on our solution, you're also able to tag a button that says I'm also stressed, and we've seen that nearly double in this scenario.

So one of the things that we've done at Livongo is make our behavioral health COVID-19 modules accessible not only to all of our members and all their employees but also nationwide. We know that this is very powerful and very important to do at this time.

JULIE HYMAN: And as you are rolling out all of these tools, I mean, obviously even before this you were sort of trying to shift the paradigm in terms of how people deal with their health without having to go to a doctor constantly if they have a chronic condition. How is that then going to be changed by what we're seeing right now? I mean, I guess it would be in your interests, in a way, for this to sort of be sped along by this process, and it seems like it's naturally going to go that way.

JENNIFER SCHNEIDER: I think that's right, Julie, and I think, you know, remote monitoring in many aspects was here. We have over 800 clients, hundreds of thousands of members for whom we've been monitoring remotely in the setting of these conditions. Coronavirus, I think in many ways, has accelerated remote monitoring as a health-care-delivery approach that is here to stay.

And so remote monitoring was in existence before. We built a great business on that. In this current setting, it was actually accelerating, and I don't think it will go away.