HACKENSACK, N.J. – 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?
“Right now, we only see our patients for about a 15-minute visit in the office, and it’s a very constricted view,” said Dr. 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 technology, 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.
Apps and trackers could ultimately reduce patient visits, though there’s a risk patients would practice self-care.
“It may be an aid or a tool to help me deliver better care, but it is just a tool,” said Dr. Robert Wergin, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “It shouldn’t substitute for a face-to-face visit.”
