Alere Medical wins contract with Ohio providers

Sometimes bumping a business up 3 percent is pleasant.

Smooth.

Easy.

So says Alere Medical Inc., a Reno-based provider of, in-home, cardiac-care monitoring.

Alere added a major new client this quarter, its first major client boost of the year.

And easy? It was an easy sell on the front end, says Joe Cummings,manager of marketing communications for Alere.

The client Paramount Health Care, an Ohio subsidiary of ProMedica health System contacted Alere.

They made the call; Alere answered the phone.

"They were predisposed to work with us," says Cummings.

So, possibly that explains why the transaction went so smoothly? Possibly.

Paramount provides health coverage in northwest Ohio,with more than 197,000 members and a network of more than 1,900 physicians and 34 hospitals.

Alere's job is to provide its remote heart failure management services to those cardiac patients, a service that includes symptom tracking, education, and monitoring by cardiac- trained nurses.

When Alere signed up Paramount about 60 days ago, it got a good response, says Cummings.

It signed up more than 700 patients within those 60 days.

That's about equal, Cummings says, to the average expected number of chronic heart patients within a group numbering 197,000 who would benefit from, and be eligible for, home monitoring."We'd expect about .5 percent to be heart patients," he says, or about 985 people.

The ease of signing up 700 patients was "a pleasant surprise," he adds.

The way it works when Alere signs on a new health provider: The provider supplies Alere with a list of its qualified patients; Alere contacts them, explaining and offering its services; patients typically contact their physicians and decide yea or nay.

Alere, founded in 1996, currently serves patients in 25 states.