(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
26 October 2017. An application is being developed for a health care system to integrate data from patients’ home medical devices into their electronic health records and clinical care plans. The collaboration between Partners Connected Health in Boston and the health care technology company Validic in Durham, North Carolina is the subject of a presentation scheduled for tomorrow at the Connected Health conference in Boston.
Partners Connected Health is the information technology division of Partners HealthCare, a health care provider system that includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital — both teaching hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School — as well as community and specialty hospitals, community health centers, a physician network, and home health and long-term care services. Among the company’s services is development and testing of mobile technologies for medication adherence, care coordination, chronic disease management, prevention, and wellness.
Validic offers a platform for connecting data collected from patient remote monitoring systems, wellness apps, fitness equipment, mobile sensors, and wearable devices with their health care provider customers, such as hospitals and clinics, as well as insurance companies, fitness clubs, and pharmaceutical enterprises. The company says it provides customers with a single connection to data from this wide variety and large number of sources, connecting more than 400 different apps, devices, and remote systems and affecting an estimated 223 million individuals.
The collaboration, which the parties say is in a pilot phase, aims at integrating data from home health care devices, such as wearables, blood pressure monitors, and blood glucose monitors for the patients’ clinicians and electronic health records. During the pilot phase, the system is focusing on home blood pressure monitors, with data stored in a cloud-based platform. Partners and Validic plan to roll out full integration into patient care plans and health records in 2018.
Kelly Santomas, a senior director at Partners Connected Health and one of the presenters at the conference session says seamless and secure sharing of patients’ data is just one the project’s objectives. “Of even greater significance,” says Santomas in a company statement, “is the ability to make this data actionable and provide evidence-based care to improve clinical efficiencies, empower patients, and strengthen the patient-provider relationship.”
The pilot phase and early roll-outs are expected to provide guidance on ways to make the data, already in standardized and privacy-compliant form, more actionable and usable in patients’ care plans. While Validic and Partners say the project is a multi-year initiative, further details about the collaboration, including financial details, were not revealed.
While wearables and fitness or wellness apps can offer a great deal more data about an individual’s health, the quality of the data can be suspect, particularly for data inferred or calculated by the device, rather than measured directly. As reported by Science & Enterprise in December 2016, Validic joined with the research institute RTI International to improve the quality and reliability of data generated by wearables, and optimize the data for research needs.
More from Science & Enterprise:
- FDA Clears First Mobile App for Substance Abuse
- Microchips Designed for Tracking Bodily Functions
- Wearable-Implant Diagnostics Device in Development
- Phone App Found to Measure Heart Health Metrics
- Trial Shows Smartphone App Finds More Heart Disease
* * *
RSS - Posts
You must be logged in to post a comment.