They’re popular and ubiquitous, but wearable fitness trackers have yet to contribute meaningfully to any health outcomes.
These consumer tech gadgets primarily reinforce healthy behaviors to people who are already healthy – and self-motivated to stay that way. 10,000 steps is a nice round number for sure, but so is zero – the number of existing baseline studies revealing a correlation between steps taken and health results, cardiovascular or otherwise.
The shadow cast by fitness trackers’ spotlight has obscured the fact that other medical devices – ones with confirmed correlations to proven health outcomes – have also been upgraded into the Internet of Things (IoT) club. Prominent examples include glucometers, blood pressure cuffs, cardiac monitors and hydration trackers. Clinical grade wearables with improved analytics also continue to enter the marketplace.
Doctors who continuously receive accurately tracked patient data from these devices would be able to tailor treatments to produce better health results. However, the American healthcare system and supporting technology infrastructure is not set up to facilitate this flow of information. Competition among providers is a deterrent to the portability of medical records.
Apple is already working on an outside solution. Their HealthKit is becoming a powerful platform to connect expanding sources of disparate health data. This critical step must come before the data can begin flowing to doctors in a useful way that will help them gain fuller insights into their patients’ overall health.
Medisafe, the leading personalized medication management platform with almost 4 million registered users – patients and caregivers – and 650 million logged medication doses, is well poised to deliver this centralized hub of patient data to healthcare providers.
With millions of users – and billions of data points – Medisafe is integrated with both Apple HealthKit and Google Fit and encourages users to import their IoT-enabled medical device data to our platform – precisely the kind correlated to proven health outcomes, as mentioned above. We also have the iCap, an IoT-connected pill bottle cap, enabling users to have their medication intake automatically logged into our platform.
Medisafe has also demonstrated its successful integration with both Cerner and Epic – two of the largest electronic health records (EHRs) in the U.S. This proof of concept will be commercially available on our platform for supported medical institutions within the coming months. It will enable patients to pull a consolidated list of their medications prescribed by physicians associated with those institutions and instantly have them organized in one place.
Because federal law and hospital policies mandate that U.S. doctors use EMR systems in many cases, transmitting Medisafe users’ health data through EMR workflow means it is ensured to reach providers – in a way that is actionable. For example, physicians will be able to better identify at-risk patients without overburdening themselves or staff. Medisafe can help triage for those patients who may end up in the hospital if they miss a medication dose.
And because MediSafe’s device integration goes beyond fitness tracker wearables into categories including IoT-connected glucometers, blood pressure cuffs and others, providers can make treatment decisions based on proven correlations.
Finally, Medisafe is able to overlay medication adherence data on top of all measurements taken by users’ IoT-connected devices. For patients whose IoT-ready blood pressure cuffs were connected to Medisafe, their doctors would not only see pressure data, but also the patients’ hypertension medication adherence alongside it. These richer datasets give doctors improved context about patients’ statuses, allowing them to apply superior patient care with meaningful outcomes.