Accelerating the Future of Healthcare: Inside TytoCare’s Partnership with Leading European Insurer SWICA

Escalating costs. Soaring demand for services. Organizational bottlenecks.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, healthcare providers faced formidable challenges in delivering effective, efficient care. The spread of the novel coronavirus only exacerbated these woes – forcing providers to experiment with new delivery models.

Enter telehealth.

As the pandemic surged in the late winter and early spring of 2020, regulators across the globe signed off on greater use of remote care services – dramatically accelerating the market’s growth and ensuring that telemedicine will be an important part of the post-pandemic healthcare landscape.

But will it actually improve the patient experience and streamline providers’ workflows?

The verdict is in from the largest European health insurer to integrate Tyto Care’s telehealth solution.

With 27,000 corporate clients and 1.5 million insured, SWICA is one of Switzerland’s leading health insurers, boasting higher customer satisfaction rankings than any other health insurance company in the country.

Reflecting its commitment to patient-centered innovation in healthcare, in 2008 SWICA launched santé24, a phone-based telehealth service. But to treat more patients remotely, save costs for payers, and enhance the patient experience, santé24 needed to boost physician productivity.

The challenge? Finding a way to do so with remote exam data, without burdening the physicians or adding costs for the payer.

Following a successful 2019 pilot project with 200 SWICA employees, the insurer introduced Tyto Care’s remote telehealth examination solution, TytoHome, to 2,000 Swiss households.

The FDA & CE approved TytoHome device seamlessly pairs with a smartphone or tablet and allows users to perform AI-guided, clinic-quality exams of the heart, lungs, skin, ears, throat, and abdomen while also measuring body temperature and heart rate.

To help SWICA’s santé24 achieve more efficient workflows using remote exam data, Tyto provided the company with a streamlined triage process using TytoHome’s asynchronous capabilities. Once a user performs remote exams, the data from these exams is sent to a triage nurse, who validates the data and determines whether any additional information is required.

Upon validation of the data, a physician reviews it, providing treatment via phone call or, if additional exams are needed, conducting a live examination as part of an online video consultation using the TytoCare platform.

Families and patients of varying age groups quickly adopted TytoHome. In the first four months of the expanded pilot program, 1,800 of the 2,000 households who received the device (90%) used it at least once, with a total of 4,552 patients. All told, santé24 conducted more than 2,000 total tests, with heart and temperature tests the most utilized.

Were users happy with the experience? Take it from the patients themselves – nine in 10 of whom gave TytoHome a rating of four or five stars.

Of course, customer satisfaction has long been one of SWICA’s top strengths. But what about physicians and caregivers? Here, too, the Tyto Care-SWICA partnership was met with overwhelmingly positive results. Of 817 offline TytoHome exams submitted to santé24 during the initial four-month period, 782 (96%) required no additional video consultation. For the other 4%, the live online telehealth sessions lasted just 15 minutes on average.

The bottom line?

Fewer consultations. Clinical-grade exam data directly from the TytoHome handheld device. A smoother, faster journey from exam to treatment, all from the comfort and safety of home.

It’s no wonder that SWICA has decided to expand the offering  during 2021 to make remote exams available anytime, anywhere to all 1.5M SWICA members.

As patients and providers alike prepare for a new normal in which telemedicine plays an increasingly prominent role, they have much to look forward to – and at long last, they can bid farewell to some of the most inconvenient aspects of the healthcare experience.

Envision a future without parents wasting hours each year driving their sick kids to doctors’ offices and spending most of that time in waiting rooms. Imagine an end to unnecessary in-person consultations – and think of how that will shorten waiting times for patients, alleviate providers’ caseloads, and prevent burnout among doctors and nurses. Ponder the savings to payers and healthcare systems.

This is not a sketch of some far-off utopia. It’s the future of healthcare – and that future is unfolding now, with payers and providers harnessing the power of TytoCare’s clinic-quality technology from Switzerland to the United States and beyond.

Interested in learning more about how Tyto Care can help your organization unlock the future of healthcare? Contact us today.