Pennsylvanian health insurance company Independence Blue Cross has awarded grants to companies developing technology for remote patient monitoring and home care.

Its inaugural Clinical Care Innovation Grants (CCI Grants) are going to Axia Women’s Health, Trinity Mid-Atlantic and Penn Medicine to support projects aimed at improving the quality and delivery of health care.

“We are proud to support these projects through our CCI Grants programme and look forward to how they will improve our members’ health care experience,” said Rodrigo Cerdá, Independence vice president. “Our hope when we invited providers to apply for these grants was that we would see submissions that reflected novel ideas that could ultimately be shared across the Independence network as best practices in the future. I am now more confident than ever that we will achieve that goal.”

The Axia Women’s Health project remotely monitors postpartum patients for hypertension using a digital health app. The app sends text messages and push notifications to patients reminding them to check their blood pressure twice a day, tracks patients’ blood pressure data, and keeps physicians up to date on patients who have an elevated or critical blood pressure reading. The goals of this monitoring are to identify preventable postpartum complications early and avoid hospital readmissions.

The Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic project manages chronic kidney disease through partnerships with patients, caretakers and primary care providers. It can reduce unnecessary use of costly health care services by providing medical and social services. And it increases engagement level with patients to control their chronic illnesses through nutrition, exercise, medication management and education about their disease.

Remote supervised cardiac rehabilitation for patients recovering from acute events related to heart disease is one of three projects at Penn Medicine. This project engages patients at home in an exercise-based, multidisciplinary programme aimed at reducing hospital readmissions, recurrent cardiac events and mortality.

The second Penn Medicine project is an automated platform called LiveAware aimed at improving on-time imaging-based screening rates for cancer. This project is also designed to reduce the cognitive burden on clinicians to determine patients eligible for cancer screening and improve patient outcomes.

Also at Penn Medicine is an automated text messaging system called Penny assisting patients with taking complicated oral chemotherapy treatments at home. This project is intended to improve treatment adherence, help effectively manage treatment side effects, and decrease the need for phone and office visits and emergency department visits.

Health systems and large specialty groups in the Independence network and enrolled in a value-based care programme are eligible to participate in the CCI Grants programme. Each entity is permitted up to three submissions a year.