Alere announces formation of Collaborative Care Solutions to support physicians, provider groups

With the goal of creating the industry standard for connecting patients and their physician-led care teams, Alere today announced the formation of a new strategic product line, Collaborative Care Solutions®.  The new product line will be focused on supporting physicians and provider groups wanting to expand their practices via patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) or accountable care organizations (ACO) -- key care models designed to realize better outcomes and more cost-effective care.

Collaborative Care Solutions consolidates technologies of Alere's market-leading Wellness and Disease Management programs, the rapid diagnostic testing capabilities of its parent Inverness Medical Innovations, and the web-based collaborative clinical care software of recently acquired RMD (a communications portal tailored specifically to the needs of physicians and their practices). When fully integrated with the Apollo Health Management System, these solutions will help reinforce treatment plans and provide more actionable, timely and patient-specific information to physicians and other care providers.

"Today, many physicians are challenged with factors they are ill-prepared to address, such as poor lifestyle habits, a lack of patient education and understanding about health risks and chronic illnesses, and non-compliance with their treatment regimens," noted Gordon Norman, MD, chief innovation officer for Alere. "Collaborative Care Solutions is designed to support physicians and their patients by promoting adherence to evidence-based treatment plans and encouraging healthy behaviors and decisions that lead to improved health."

Collaborative Care Solutions enables greater connectivity among clinicians, patients and other business partners for improved care coordination, by providing a "one-to-many" solution for the entire practice that is based on an intuitive, modular, web-based platform.  It also serves to promote more efficient, convenient health care delivery, including secure messaging, remote care monitoring, condition registries, quality reporting, and e-prescribing.  The Collaborative Care Solutions service can share data with and act as a complement to electronic medical record (EMR) systems in use by a physician practice, said Darren M. Schulte, MD, executive vice president of Collaborative Care for Alere.  "By knitting together disparate data sources at a patient level, we help physicians operate more efficiently, make smarter and more informed health care decisions, and practice at the top of their license."