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Using VR To Improve Access To Care in Rural Communities
The Captain’s Log is where I share personal perspectives, updates and company milestones from our journey building IKONA.
Two weeks ago news of our partnership with Fresenius hit the wire, followed by a deluge of public and private support. First and foremost, from all of us at IKONA, thank you. We share your excitement and are eager to share more when able. The recent news is a major milestone for IKONA and for our partners at Fresenius. The win marks one of our proudest moments to date on this journey, and foreshadows dramatic improvements in the ways people with kidney disease learn about their health and treatment options. Fresenius serves more than 7,500 patients in 137 outpatient dialysis centers in Mississippi, and we have already partnered to create virtual reality experiences for patients in South Carolina, Illinois, Massachusetts and California.1
“An initial diagnosis of chronic kidney disease can be daunting for patients. The virtual reality education for our patients is another way we can enhance our patient education and show them how to be in control of their treatment,” said Dean Chan, Vice President of Kidney Care Advocates at Fresenius Kidney Care.
“Expanding this innovative project into rural areas of Mississippi will allow our Kidney Care Advocates and care teams to offer patients in underserved areas a more informed experience of the decision to move to home therapy and help them be successful.”
Our collaboration is a testament to what's possible when organizations choose to take action to address unmet needs in the current healthcare system. We are aligned in our commitment to address unmet needs and barriers faced by patients across care settings. From dialysis clinics to patients' homes, we are at an inflection point in how people see, understand, and experience their care at critical moments in their care journeys.
Here's why it matters, what's at stake and what the world will look like when we get it right.
What this means for IKONA
IKONA is dedicated to improving peoples' lives by tackling some of the toughest learning challenges in healthcare. We believe learning is healthcare's next frontier marked for deeper exploration. Because of this, we get excited about the art and science of finding new ways to help people develop health literacy, guided by the neurobiology of learning to build tools that bring a new standard of clarity to the point of care.
This month's news — about an industry-leading partnership and grant focused on increasing access to health care services in rural communities — validates the role of health literacy as a social determinant of health. Importantly, it also highlights the larger opportunity to close existing gaps between patients, their health, and their care.
We will continue building evidence-based education modules and an enterprise-focused learning platform designed to address the toughest challenges across complex care settings, from dialysis clinics to patients' homes and beyond. Building novel solutions requires vision, dedication, patience, resilience, and bold partners who see the shared future you believe in and want to help make it happen.
Looking ahead, we will continue to do what we have done since the earliest days at IKONA: develop deep partnerships that allow us to dig deeper into the root causes of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and psychosocial barriers to effective learning. These partnerships and problem sets are what we love, what give us energy, and what we see as our north star as we think about the future of learning in healthcare. They are our reasons for existence, and there is no better or more deserving group to solve these challenges with than the kidney community.
Why this matters for the future of (kidney) care
Awareness of kidney disease is on the rise thanks in large part to consistent, growing efforts by dozens of stakeholder groups including federal, state and local governments, businesses, nonprofits and grassroots advocacy groups. There's good reason for this. Roughly 1 in 5 Medicare dollars is spent on kidney care. And the deeper you go into this complex ecosystem — including access, cost, quality, and outcomes — the more you realize just how much room we have to improve how we care for those living and impacted by kidney diseases in this country.
Understanding treatment options like dialysis and transplant is of vital importance for those faced with this decision. Let's take Mississippi as a case study to see why:
10,132 Mississippi residents are living with kidney failure, or end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Of those, 8,132 of those patients depend on dialysis to survive. The other 2,000 patients have transplants.2
There were 1,750 new cases of kidney failure in the state in 2018. Of those patients, 1,729 went on dialysis and just 21 received transplants.
Home dialysis often means more frequent treatments. More frequent dialysis better mimics natural kidney function leading to 36% fewer prescriptions for blood pressure medication and improved five-year survival rates.
Patients who dialyze more frequently are also more likely to receive transplants, with transplantation incidence increased by 14% in patients who use home therapies.
Put simply, helping the nearly 11,000 new patients diagnosed with kidney disease each month in the United States to better understand their care and treatment options is going to require novel approaches and tools. Kidney care is unique, but it is not alone in this struggle to help patients overcome their fears of the unknown to take control of their care.
Making better care decisions a reality
Think about this opportunity: 37 million Americans are estimated to have kidney disease, yet preventing a patient's progression to kidney failure can save $250,000 per patient while improving (and extending) quality of life.3 Closing this gap is paramount, and improving the ways people learn, understand and apply their knowledge of kidney health is how we plan to do our part to support this global fight. It is incumbent on all of us who have the privilege of working in support of this community to find ways to stem the tide and bend the arc of reality toward a more accessible, knowledgeable and confident future.
At the end of the day, health literacy, patient education and even frontline conversations are all types of learning problems. These learning problems can be solved with the right approach, tools, creativity, patience and support.
For those who focus on problems over products, and fears over features, the future is yours to create. For now, the future of learning is ours to build― and build we shall.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn in January, 2023.
Fresenius, IKONA Health Receive Major Grant to Expand Virtual Reality Healthcare Education, Improve Access in Rural Mississippi (PR Newswire, Fresenius)
ESRD in Mississippi - 2021 Report (American Kidney Fund)
Toward a More Collaborative Federal Response to CKD (Adv Chron Kid Dis, 2011)