A feasibility test of the care.coach™ avatar-enabled participant support system at On Lok Lifeways in 2016 showed that the avatars were able to successfully engage a diverse group of PACE participants, building positive social relationships that were observed to help improve medication adherence, mitigate anxiety, and achieve high satisfaction ratings. Various participants benefited individually from improved diabetic self-management, fall prevention exercise adherence, and early detection of falls in the home.

In early 2017 Element Care began a quality improvement project based on previous findings and recommendations from On Lok, with the goal to achieve consistent clinical and financial outcomes across the intervention population. Focus was given to selecting participants who exhibited particularly high health care risk and cost as exemplified by heuristic measures, including emergency department visit history, chronic conditions and substance use disorder. Preliminary data, as of May 2017, show that the avatar-driven intervention protocols were able to achieve significant financial savings by reducing a combination of hospital admissions, avoidable emergency department visits and home RN visits.

As this project is ongoing, the poster reflects the latest outcome data, as well as a description of the novel avatar-driven intervention protocols that were developed, validated, and integrated into the PACE team workflow to address the challenges of this unique participant population.