Addressing the Long-Term Illness Patient Outcome and Care Cost Paradigm
A growing body of clinical evidence shows that anxiety, depression, and stress play a significant role in disease and treatment outcomes.
The technical aspects of discontinued curative care are straightforward. However, the psychosocial and ethical components of transitioning to long-term illness and palliative care are not. Our goal is to apply a holistic approach including clinical research, integration into university curriculum and extended learning, practical versus theoretical training, an interprofessional education series, and resources for staff caregivers and students across all healthcare settings supported by conscious technology.
One of the positive directions of the contemporary healthcare delivery system is the so-called “self-management” movement for patients faced with long-term illness issues. Compelling evidence indicates that active patient participation in the healthcare process has real medical, social, individual and economic benefits. NewPathVR provides psychological resources to patients to address this evidence-backed direction for addressing patient outcomes and costs.
A large market driver for the ever-pressing need for such tools and services is reflected in the growing aging population.
The Aging Population
As a growing number of the population ages, professional care is increasingly rationed, and there is a greater need — and a very favorable cost/benefit outcome — for patients to actively participate in their own care. For example, the Stanford School of Medicine has a workshop based called Chronic Disease Self-Management Program which is a workshop given two and a half hours, once a week, for six weeks, in community settings such as senior centers, churches, libraries, and hospitals. People with different chronic health problems attend together.
Patients who took the program, when compared to those who did not, demonstrated significant improvements in exercise, cognitive symptom management, communication with physicians, self-reported general health, health distress, fatigue, disability, and social/role activities limitations. They also spent fewer days in the hospital, and there was also a trend toward fewer outpatient visits and hospitalizations. These data yield a cost to savings ratio of approximately 1:4. Many of these results persist for as long as three years.”
Patients in these types of programs could also benefit from access to NewPathVR apps, either as part of other programs or as its own programs.
Our long-term illness solutions aim to improve the quality of life of patients facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering of stress and other issues, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.
Reducing patient anxiety, arming patients with the right information, teaching them to ask the right questions, and encouraging them to take an active role in their palliative care, will result in clinically measurable improvements in psychosocial health, pain control, and quality of life.
There is a growing body of scientific and medical information about the ‘mind-body’ connection which strongly supports NewPathVR’s premise about the benefits of social and psychological resources being available to patients.
Robert Aden PhD. is the ‘father’ of the field of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’ and a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. His initial research, dating back as far as the 1970s, served as the beginning of many subsequent studies that have since mapped the vast communications network among immune cells, hormones, and neurotransmitters. This body of research has found that meditation helps reduce arterial plaque; that social bonds improve cancer survival; that people under stress catch more colds; and that placebos work not only on the human mind but also on supposedly insentient cells.
At the core of Dr. Ader’s breakthrough research was his scientific demonstration that stress worsens illness — sometimes even triggering it — and that reducing stress is essential to health care.
Patients and their families are often exposed to inaccurate and misleading information regarding their illness and care. Information obtained from mass media or printed handouts can exacerbate rather than alleviate patient anxiety. Frequently, the best available source of information, doctors, especially those operating in a highly ‘managed’ system, are not available for discussion, or are inadequately trained to meet educational responsibilities, or provide information overload, or use medical terminology that patients do not understand or retain.
NewPathVR’s goal is to assist a broad population of patients in a way that improves the quality of their lives and the efficacy of their care. Virtual reality offers a new medium by which information can be acquired inefficient, innovative, and powerful ways.
NewPathVR programs and content are designed to close the consultative gap, and yet keep individuals returning to a healthcare system with less anxiety which can offer these better informed and prepared subjects more effective and personalized care.
Our goal is to keep people returning to their professional caregivers with less anxiety and a greater capacity to be treated effectively.
Learn more about us at http://www.newpathvr.com.
