That phone app keeping track of your exercise and meals might keep you out of the hospital one day.
Why give your doctors permission to incorporate data from fitness trackers and health apps into electronic patient records? Well, they might spot signs of an ailment sooner and suggest behavioral changes or medication before you land in the emergency room. They also might be able to monitor how you are healing from surgery or whether you are following a treatment regimen.
“Right now we only see our patients for about a 15-minute visit in the office, and it’s a very constricted view,” said. Lauren Koniaris, a specialist in pulmonary critical care at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “This really globalizes the view of their health status, so that we’re really in contact with them on a much more daily, if not hour-to-hour, basis. It’s almost like a virtual house call.”
At Hackensack, a handful of patients at risk for heart failure are asked to use a fitness tracker to count steps walked and flights climbed. They are also asked to record what they eat — by photographing the product’s bar code, for instance — using a phone app that has a database containing nutrition information on thousands of food items. Using Apple’s new HealthKit platform, data from the various trackers and apps gets automatically transferred to the Epic MyChart app on the iPhone. From there, the information goes to the hospital’s records system, which also comes from Epic.
Hackensack wants to expand to more patients and start tracking blood pressure and amount of sleep, too. However, the hospital first needs to ensure that teams are in place to review the glut of data coming in. More broadly, there is also a question of whether these trackers and app really improve patient care, and consumer privacy and security issues to address. The University of California, San Francisco is studying which gadgets are reliable and whether that reliability extends to patients with extreme conditions. Then they have to figure out which data are really meaningful — not just noise.
“If we’re going to succeed in improving health, we have to get patients more engaged in their care,” Ochsner cardiologist Richard Milani said.
Heart attack patients have long been asked to weigh themselves, while those with diabetes have had to check glucose levels. Smartphone technology makes all that easier and gets measurements to doctors more regularly and reliably. There is no forgetting to record a number or transposing digits.
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