A CT health care system is sending people home with new technology. Why it’s called a ‘game changer’

Hartford Courant – Sunday, August 2, 2026
By Helen I. Bennett

Hartford HealthCare president and CEO Jeffrey Flaks is well-known for working to spread healthcare across the state.

During his tenure, Hartford HealthCare has opened a Fairfield Cancer Center, created as a Care Partner of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, created a new 24/7 concierge provision of healthcare app, opened at least 500 locations in the state, and bought and integrated Manchester Memorial Hospital and the Rockville campus into the massive system’s statewide operation.

That’s amid 879,889 primary care and 473,795 emergency department visits to the system in 2023 and more than 6,600 physicians and 6,286 nurses of all types on staff across the health system. The Manchester and Rockville acquisitions added about 2,500 new colleagues to the healthcare system.

Yet, Flaks also believes that with Hartford HealthCare, the future of health care “in many ways is in the home,” he said.

“Hartford Healthcare has to move from being episodic and transactional,” Flaks said in an interview, during which he spoke of a new program the system launched: Hartford HealthCare Remote Care.

The system, called Cadence, is technology assigned to certain patients and it uses home monitoring, AI-supported clinical insights, and clinician oversight to help patients with conditions such as high blood pressure, heart failure and diabetes stay healthier between visits, according to Flaks and others. It is part of moving “from a sick care system to a health care system,” Flaks said.

“Cadence demonstrates we can help people manage their health,” Flaks said. “It allows us to intervene and allows us to help avoid more costly interventions. It allows us to partner with people to maintain and optimize their health. We can avoid significant, costly hospital admissions.”

Flaks said such technology is part of the “future of healthcare,” and a “game changer, an early proof of what we will see to help people live their healthiest life.”

Cadence says one of its goals is “flagging risk early so we can act before a crisis.”

Dr. Padmanabhan Premkumar said once Cadence enrollment is completed and the device is sent to the patient’s home, the entire medical group working with it is trained on Hartford HealthCare clinical protocol.

“Our goal is to continue to stay connected to our patients at all points across the healthcare journey,” he said, also in an interview. “For us the program allows us to monitor … data comes to us on a consistent basis.”

Premkumar said it is part of “allowing people to keep track of their health.”

“That should be the goal for healthcare across the country,” he said.

However, Premkumar said, while “there are tremendous uses for technology” it is important to note that “the human element is so important.”

“Having clinicians on the back end, that is true human connection,” Premkumar said about the Cadence system. “It is still a human, a professional at the end of the day.”

State resident Tom Pointer said he has been using the new, no-cost monitoring system at his home and even while camping in another state. Any time he has a question, he calls and “it’s a real person” to whom he can speak.

“I think it is absolutely outstanding,” Pointer said, describing looking at the device, not liking a reading and having fast access to health care professionals, who also will inform his doctor. The system itself also takes readings, and Cadence reaches out to him and his doctor, he said.

“It is an accountability system,” he said.

Having Pointer use the system at home means his readings are done in real time and treatment decisions are not based on isolated readings taken weeks or months apart. The system allows monitoring of trends, therefore providing a more complete picture of what’s happening in his daily life, he said. He said he knew he could trust the system because it is trusted by his doctor, Dr. Paul McFarlane.

McFarlane said Hartford HealthCare is using the technology, “driven by research” and “backed by true scientific data” to drive “good patient outcomes.”

“It is about creating access to care,” he said, noting the system can monitor readings for diabetes, blood pressure and more and “these are chronic disease we should be managing in the home.”

McFarlane said there is “beauty” in having “many points of access” to patients, and there is trust in partners, and “we can identify people who needs additional care; they have access points though the day.”

The system can provide alerts and “allows us to have patients at the forefront,” he said, and placed on schedules more frequently if needed. “Cadence sends us messages, [such as if] blood pressure is trending high, it’s proactive rather than reactive,” McFarlane said.

As it is there at all times for patients, it is part of a shared goal: “safe and efficient patient care,” he said.

“We want to care for Tom across his lifetime,” McFarlane said.

Premkumar said Cadence is “far more real time” than previous monitoring systems and the goal is enrolling “more and more” patients so that “we can get close to them on a day to day basis.”

Hartford Hospital also is building a $950 million in-patient and surgical tower in Hartford that is expected to open in 2031, will be 14 stories tall and double the height of the next tallest building on the 70-acre campus.

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