Verustat provides pathway to hot remote monitoring market

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Verustat, the latest venture from Rich Roberts, Emmet Seibels and Steve Goode, wants HME providers to be their “eyes and ears” for physicians looking for a remote patient monitoring solution to improve patient care.

Verustat, which launched this fall as a vendor partner with VGM & Associates, will pay providers management fees for introducing their company and its RPM solution to physicians, and helping the company facilitate and manage those relationships.

“We need their help with the practitioners on the ground - they have all the relationships they've built over the years and they can be our eyes and ears locally,” said Goode, executive vice president of sales. “This really leverages those relationships and the good name those companies have, and includes them in the process.”

Verustat's RPM solution encompasses blood pressure cuffs, weight scales, pulse oximeters and glucose meters from several manufacturers to measure vital signs daily.

What differentiates Verustat from other RPM solutions, however, is its full-service approach, which includes remote care coordinators to set up and monitor patients, company officials say. When a patient's vitals are outside the thresholds set by their physicians, for example, the coordinators call the patient to make sure it's not a false alarm and, if not, notifies their physician.

“When you think about the solutions being offered by Silicon Valley companies, they're going straight to the physician through Google ad words and they're focusing on the equipment,” Goode said. “They don't have the coordinator program that we have.”

Roberts, Seibels and Goode looked into RPM back in 2016, when they were running Verus Healthcare, a CPAP resupply company that leveraged software and call centers, but without Medicare reimbursement, “there wasn't enough money in it,” says Seibels, president of Verustat.

Now there are a handful of CPT codes associated with RPM and interest in the technology has skyrocketed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When that happened, we knew we had to use our CPAP compliance knowledge and software knowledge, and go after this,” said Seibels, who, along with Roberts has also launched SnapWorx, a software company providing a patient contact management and workflow optimization platform for the CPAP resupply market. “The name of the game in RPM is compliance and technology.”