According to a recent news report, a majority of the nation's biggest health systems are testing out Apple's HealthKit. Not surprisingly, a lot of the smaller providers are dipping their toes in the water, too.
At King's Daughters Medical Center, a 122-bed hospital in Brookhaven, Miss., officials see Apple Health as part of a patient engagement platform so much more advanced than the portal they're now using. And it's got Carl Smith, the hospital's I.S. director, excited about the possibilities.
'This is something that people do everyday anyway," he said. "They all carry their phones – for almost everything except a phone call. This gives us a chance to connect with them in the simplest, most meaningful way possible."
KDMC is partnering with Boxford, Mass.-based Iatric Systems on the HealthKit project, just as they had worked together in developing the MyKDMC patient portal. The portal, says Smith, was the hospital's first real venture into a patient engagement environment that's designed to give patients access to their data at a moment's notice - and to improve the interaction between patient and provider.
"The portal was the first test on that. And it allowed patients to get their information instantly, something that used to take days or weeks," Smith said. "They used to have to come to the hospital for their records. We saw what it meant to them to have that."
"This is all just a small piece of patient engagement," Smith added. "It's another piece in the puzzle. Patients that actively get involved in their own care get better outcomes, and better outcomes mean lower costs."
With Apple's HealthKit, Smith hopes to tap into a wide range of mHealth resources, from smartphones and tablets to mobile devices used by patients to gather their own health data.
“People have been talking about patient-centered healthcare for a while, and patient engagement as we know it today is a first step, but it’s not the end-game," said Frank Fortner, Iatric's president, in a November 2014 press release announcing the partnership with KDMC. "Hospitals must deliver the tools patients need to truly become active in their own healthcare; that means bringing together patient data from all sources and presenting it to patients in a simple, clear and actionable way."
“Integrating Apple Health across hospital enterprises begins to lay the groundwork for where the healthcare industry needs to head, which is creating real patient empowerment at the intersection of active patient engagement and the quantified self, or self-tracking, movement where personal fitness devices and software applications are already making a difference,” Fortner added.
Like KDMC, Memorial Healthcare, a 150-bed hospital is Owosso, Mich., also hooked up with Iatric to try out the Apple Health platform. Frank Fear, the hospital's CIO and vice president of ancillary services, said the app is a natural extension of efforts to get patients more involved in their healthcare.
“We envision our patients using Apple Health easily because for many, the iPhone is already a main part of their lives. We needed to make the self-empowerment tool easy for our patients to access,” he said. “We could have integrated Apple Health within a portal from our EHR vendor or ambulatory system vendor, but data from disparate systems sits in silos. Iatric Systems was a natural fit because their portal integrates across all of our systems, giving us one tool for capturing and sending data to patients and, eventually, receiving data back from them.”
