Case Study

Northern Light Health, a leader in rural healthcare innovation in Maine, has provided in-home monitoring services for its patients for more than a decade. The healthcare organization recognized that the data it collects can be used to improve patient care, and it partnered with the Roux Institute—namely, researchers Rai Winslow, director of life science and medical research, and Melanie Tory, director of data visualization research—to apply this data for that purpose. Winslow is a world-renowned leader in computational medicine, an emerging discipline that he helped create, and Tory is an expert in human-data interaction. Winslow and Tory’s teams work together; Winslow creates algorithms that predict patient health outcomes, and Tory’s group designs software tools that help nurses understand patient information generated by the algorithms.  

Northern Light Health and the Roux Institute want to help caregivers deliver better in-home treatment and act sooner when patients in rural communities require in-person care, while also ensuring that the solutions the Roux team develops meet the patients’ needs, too. To get started, the Roux team plans to observe and interview healthcare providers and patients about their experiences with in-home treatment and health monitoring. The collaboration aims to identify new technologies for in-home care, like a digital stethoscope for listening to heart and lung sounds, and expand the types of medical conditions telehealth can treat.