Digital tools such as biosensors and physical trackers—have enabled both patients to seek the care they require, without having to sacrifice their autonomy and independence. But how far have we reached with it? Can digital solutions eliminate care gaps even for those who require close attention and care?
Biosency, a digital solution company, has made it possible. It has developed and markets a connected medical device designed to improve the care pathway for patients with respiratory insufficiency. The company offers a disruptive digital solution, integrating the analysis of clinical data, to optimize the monitoring of patients’ progress at home and to facilitate the coordination of healthcare professionals.
In an interview with Insights Care, Marie Pirotais, the CEO shares in depth about Biosency’s products and operations in developing reliable, non-invasive remote monitoring solutions for chronic respiratory diseases during patients’ everyday life.
Following are the excerpts from the interview.
Kindly tell us about your journey and inspiration behind venturing into the healthcare sector.
As an engineer with a career in innovation and development of new products, I was touched by the challenges of respiratory insufficiency and particularly COPD, during a discussion with my partner Yann Le Guillou and his twin brother Frédéric, a pneumologist.
We discovered the economics and health stakes of this disease. COPD is the 3rd cause of death in the world. Affected by the subject, we decided to put our skills at the service of these patients and tackle the challenges of COPD.
What is the company about? How is it contributing to the existing needs of healthcare? What solution is it bringing to the table?
Monitoring patients at home using connected vital signs monitoring solutions can predict deterioration in their health status, improve their quality of life and reduce hospitalization rates. Biosency secures patient care at home with digital predictive medicine solutions based on automatic and regular measurement of vital signs.
Our solution Bora Care® is a patient-centric Remote Patient Monitoring platform (MD class 2a) for chronic respiratory disease care management such as COPD, the 3rd leading cause of death worldwide affecting 445 million patients. The platform combines a connected wristband tracking 6 parameters including 3 vital signs, a web app for physicians, and a patient-centric app. The technology identifies physiological changes and alerts physicians and patients to take targeted actions, improving patient outcomes and reducing hospitalizations, ultimately leading to cost savings.
Please give us an idea about the company’s core solutions/products and their importance in healthcare today.
COPD is punctuated by crises called exacerbations. They lead to emergency hospitalizations, which represent 60% of the costs of the disease. The mortality rate is 26% only one year after the first severe exacerbation.
Thanks to the measurement of key predictive biomarkers such as respiratory rate and blood oxygen level, our remote monitoring solution, Bora-Care, gives us a unique position to predict acute COPD exacerbations. We can alert the physician up to 7 days before the crisis and thus allow him to adapt the treatment and avoid the exacerbation or at least to reduce its intensity and thus reduce the hospitalization time and improve the quality of life of the patients. Our clinical results are already beyond the state of the art with a prediction rate of 86%.
By combining advanced hardware and software solutions, Biosency has created a highly differentiated product that has the potential to transform the way chronic respiratory patients are monitored and treated.
Brief us about the company’s core products.
Biosency has developed several key enabling technologies to support its BORA Care® product, which is a comprehensive and highly differentiated solution for the prevention and prediction of acute respiratory crises in chronic respiratory patients. These technologies include:
- Bora Band®: This is a connected bracelet that measures patients’ vital signs and activity automatically and regularly without any action from the patient. Biosency has maximized patient compliance by adopting a user-centric approach. In clinical studies, the bracelet has been worn on average 90% of the time during 17,000 days of telemonitoring, with an average monitoring duration of 131 days. The Bora Band® measures oxygen saturation rate, respiratory rate, heart rate, skin temperature, activity duration and the number of steps.
- Bora Box: This is a gateway device that securely transmits patients’ data to a health data hosting server automatically and regularly without any action from the patient.
- Bora Connect®: This is a web platform for patient monitoring and early detection of physiological changes such as COPD exacerbations. The platform includes a telemedicine dashboard optimized for the monitoring and prioritization of high-risk patients. It displays personalized vital sign measurements and patient activity data, as well as metrics for respiratory effort and heart rate variability extracted from the Bora Band® signal, enabling specific investigations by caregivers in case of abnormal vital sign readings. The platform also displays the BVS3® score for the risk of acute respiratory deterioration based on an AI algorithm. Caregivers can configure alerts for vital signs, activity data, and risk scores, and receive notifications when alerts are triggered. The platform also manages user account statuses, enabling healthcare organizations to optimize care coordination.
- Personalized Patient Access: Patients can access their own vital signs and activity data, allowing for personalized therapeutic education and increased responsibility for their health.
In addition to these enabling technologies, Biosency has also developed sophisticated algorithms based on artificial intelligence to provide caregivers with predictive insights into patients’ health status. The BVS3® score, for example, is a key feature of the Bora Connect® platform, enabling caregivers to detect exacerbations of COPD before they occur. This score is calculated based on machine learning algorithms that consider a range of factors, including vital signs and activity data.
Overall, Biosency’s key enabling technologies have been designed to maximize patient compliance, improve care coordination, and enable caregivers to detect and prevent acute respiratory crises in chronic respiratory patients. By combining advanced hardware and software solutions, Biosency has created a highly differentiated product that has the potential to transform the way chronic respiratory patients are monitored and treated.
The company also offers an interoperable remote monitoring offer (API and SDK) to be integrated into existing third-party platforms to boost growth, with several partners already on board.
Can you elaborate upon the core values on which the company is built and what is its mission? How are these aligned with patient care?
The company shares 4 core values:
Ethics
We innovate in the medical sector and the processing of health data with transparency and compliance with the rules and regulations.
Commitment
We are very attentive to the continuous improvement of the user and customer experience and are committed to optimizing it every day. Each employee is involved in his or her work and performs it to the best of his or her ability in an agile manner.
Professionalism
The quality of our connected system is the result of the high standards and expertise of our teams, who are highly involved and work in a collective spirit to serve the company’s project and its beneficiaries.
Trust
We establish long-term relationships of trust with our clients and partners. Our employees also evolve in a benevolent environment where freedom of action and speech must allow everyone to work in the best conditions for personal and professional development.
What specific endeavors is the company leading at present? Why do you find those essential in the arena of healthcare?
The specific projects currently carried out by the company are on the prediction of COPD exacerbation which is our first challenge and for which we already have results beyond the state of the art. We are already developing new predictive algorithms for new pathologies and are also working on the integration of new measures in our devices.
How do you envision scaling the company’s services and operations in 2023 and beyond?
Patient remote monitoring is a fast-growing market, a source of opportunities. The reimbursement by the French Government for Chronic Patient Monitoring and our partnership with an industrial group will strengthen our growth in Western Europe.
Our clinical results on our predictive solution and the presentation in May at the American Thoracic Society will allow us to demonstrate the value of our predictive algorithms, and to bring this breakthrough innovation to the benefit of patients.
