RESTORATIVE CARE GRANT AWARDED TO TELISTAT

TeliStat, along with Senator George Amedore and Senator Kemp Hannon, today announced they will receive $4.5 million over three years from a New York State Department of Health grant for TeliStat’s innovative Restorative Care Unit Demonstration at Golden Hill Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Kingston.

The Restorative Care Unit Demonstration at Golden Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation improves the quality of care delivered to the most chronic individuals by integrating state of the art, proprietary technology with highly skilled clinical and medical staff in skilled nursing facility setting. The grant funding was included in the 2016-17 state budget as a way to evaluate the program to analyze its effectiveness and make recommendations to implement restorative care programs statewide.

“Our driving mission is to develop innovative technology and concepts which are transformative in the delivery of health care services to our senior population. I would like to thank Senator George Amedore, Senator Kemp Hannon and the New York State Department of Health for the recognition and support toward this exciting endeavor,” said Dr. Anthony J. Bacchi, MD, who developed the groundbreaking demonstration project.

“Dr. Bacchi’s innovative concept has transformed the quality of care being delivered, and I am happy to help them secure this funding that will allow them to continue their good work and serve as a model to establish similar restorative care programs and improve quality of care throughout the state,” said Senator George Amedore.

"I'm pleased to have worked with Senator Amedore, Dr. Bacchi and the Department of Health to secure this grant for TeliStat," said Senator Kemp Hannon (R-Nassau). "We included this in the 2016-17 State budget to review, evaluate, and analyze the restorative care program for effectiveness and replicability and to propose recommendations for statewide implementation. This will allow TeliStat to showcase their efforts statewide, becoming an effective exemplar for additional restorative care programs throughout New York."

TeliStat is in the final staging of building a strategic partnership with Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY to use high performance computing and analytics to provide IT support, as well as product research and development.

"One of our goals as a college is to offer technologies to like-minded organizations that create a lasting impact on our local community,” said Bill Thirsk, Vice President of Information Technology/CIO at Marist College. “Partnering with an organization such as TeliStat provides the opportunity to support our local and regional community by sharing services in support of community needs.”

The Restorative Care Unit at Golden Hill began operating in January 2015 and has served over 1,000 patients. More than 20 percent of Medicare patients who are discharged from a hospital to a nursing home return within 30 days, with more than 90 percent of those being unplanned. The federal government estimates the cost of readmissions for Medicare patients alone at $26 billion annually, with more than $17 million of the costs being attributed to return trips that would not have been necessary with proper care.

The Restorative Care Unit at Golden Hill has demonstrated a hospital readmission rate for these Medicare recipients of less than five percent during this period. It is this achievement, that aligns with federal and state goals of providing higher quality, more cost-effective care, that resulted in the state grant to study the feasibility of expanding the Restorative Care concept throughout the state.