Helping Rural Health Organizations Deliver Remote Care With Tendco Health

Challenge Facing Rural Health Organizations

Rural hospitals and practices are expected to improve chronic disease outcomes, reduce avoidable escalations, and perform well on quality measures, often with limited staff and limited access to specialty support. Many of these rural health organizations receive reports showing gaps in quality performance, but they lack the time and infrastructure to translate those findings into changes that will lead to more consistent patient outreach and better outcomes.

Tendco Health, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, partners with rural health organizations to close those gaps and implement improvements using pharmacist-led remote care supported by Prevounce’s remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices and care management platform. 

The Solution: Pharmacist-Led Remote Care Powered by Prevounce

Thea Blystone, PharmD, leads Tendco Health, providing remote care that extends a rural organization’s clinical capacity without adding internal headcount. Since 2021, her team has used Prevounce’s remote care management technology to more efficiently manage patients in rural communities.

Prevounce supports Tendco Health’s model in three practical ways:

1. Continuous visibility into patient status. RPM readings give Tendco early signals when a patient is trending off track, enabling outreach and course correction before a minor issue becomes an acute event.
2. Structured, scalable technology for ongoing patient management. Prevounce provides Tendco with a centralized platform to deploy devices, capture and trend patient readings, automate documentation, and support compliant billing workflows, enabling efficient management across multiple rural client populations.
3. Compliance safeguards built into the platform. Dr. Blystone selected Prevounce because the platform is designed to support compliant workflows that can withstand audit scrutiny.

How Rural Clients Benefit: Turning Quality Reports Into Action

At Meadville Medical Center in Pennsylvania and other rural partner organizations, Tendco uses Prevounce’s technology to help operationalize quality reports by identifying high-risk patient cohorts and proactively engaging them. Tendco requests targeted patient lists from its clients, including:

• Patients negatively impacting quality measures and Medicare star ratings
• Patients who call their provider frequently
• Patients not improving despite appropriate clinical checklists, often due to adherence, health literacy, or nutrition barriers

With those cohorts identified, Tendco uses Prevounce RPM data plus consistent monthly and as-needed outreach to deliver education, medication optimization support, and escalation pathways when patients require in-person evaluation. This helps rural health organizations reduce office staff workloads while improving patient experience, quality performance, and outcomes.

What This Looks Like in Practice: Outcomes Clients Experience

Through remote care powered by Prevounce technology, Tendco Health delivers measurable improvements for rural providers and their patients such as:

• Catching issues early. Continuous RPM data allows Tendco to identify concerning trends and coordinate timely interventions before they become emergency room visits or hospitalizations.
• Driving better chronic disease control. By pairing RPM insights with patient education and accountability, Tendco helps patients stabilize conditions like hypertension and diabetes.
• Strengthening star ratings and quality measures. Prevounce reporting and proactive engagement help close care gaps and adherence before reporting deadlines, supporting stronger quality performance.
• Reducing strain on rural health organizations. Earlier risk identification and coordinated follow-up decrease crisis-driven care and free up staff to focus more on proactive, high-impact, patient-centered support. 

Learn More About the Program at Meadville Medical Center

Dr. Blystone previously shared additional insights about the RPM program implemented at Meadville Medical Center in a Q&A with Prevounce titled “Why Our Rural Hospital Added Remote Patient Monitoring,” where she discussed how the program supports rural care delivery.