One of the biggest drivers of health costs is the lack of coordinated care as patients are discharged after a surgery or other inpatient stay.  One in three patients aged 21 and older, discharged from a hospital to the community does not see a doctor within 30 days of discharge.  These patients are at the highest risk of being readmitted to the hospital.  While this is a problem for all payers, the estimate for Medicare is that readmissions cost $15 billion a year and $12 billion of these readmissions are considered preventable.

One contributor to high readmissions is considered to be a lack of communication and coordination among the patient, care giver, primary care doctor and hospital's physicians.   The primary care physician may not even know that their patient has been admitted to or discharged from a hospital and therefore is unable to reconcile the patient's medications, address questions regarding discharge instructions or reinforce prescribed rehabilitation and/or behavior modification. And, patients are often unsure when or how to connect to the physicians they need to see or to access the community resources that are important in their recovery.

The Janssen Connected Care Challenge is looking for approaches that will improve both patients' direct engagement with their care and recovery and physicians' connectivity to patients during the recovery process after hospital discharge. We are particularly interested in technology enabled clinical solutions that focus on improving information sharing between hospitals, patients, care givers and community-based doctors as a way to target this communication and coordination gap.  Ideally, these approaches would be easy for patients to access and would take advantage of the tools and technology that patients and physicians have or can easily acquire.  We envision these solutions as "low tech" (for example, texting using the patient's own cell phones) that could be quickly adopted and scaled with minimal cost. We are seeking approaches that have the potential to improve health and post-hospital care and to lower costs of unnecessary readmissions and physician services that could occur.