The San Diego-based health system has integrated its Allscripts EHR platform with the Apple Health Records mHealth app, giving providers and patients new ways to collaborate on care management.
To healthcare providers, the idea of a patient accessing all of his or her medical records through one mHealth app can be both heartening and daunting. While most feel the patient should own that data, there’s concern over how it might be put to use.
To Elan Hekier, MD, Chief Medical Information and Innovation Officer for the Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group, patients with mHealth access to their data are more informed and better able to collaborate on care management.
“Twenty years ago, this data lived in a folder in your primary care office,” he says. It was hard to reach, even harder to transport and tough to read. Now, “it’s within easy reach, and it allows us to have richer conversations.”
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San Diego’s Sharp HealthCare was one of several to benefit this fall when Allscripts announced that it had integrated its electronic health platforms with Apple Health Records, giving patients easy access to their data through Apple’s connected health platform. On another level, Sharp is one of hundreds of hospitals, health systems, clinics and other providers expanding patient access to information through mHealth channels.
“Giving our patients easy and mobile access to their healthcare providers and their health records is important to us,” Rick Pane, Chief Operating Officer at Nebraska-based Thinks Whole Person Healthcare, said in the press release announcing the Allscripts-Apple collaboration. “Today, people can access all kinds of information. Their own health records should be at the top of the list. At Think, we aim to be the leaders in changing healthcare and helping people to live their healthiest lives. It makes absolute sense to partner with the leader in technology to help do so.”
But how do doctors and nurses react to this newly-empowered patient?
The challenge may lie in getting patients used to the idea of accessing their information when and where they need it. According to a study published earlier this year in JAMA, not a lot of people have taken advantage of the mHealth tool since it was launched in 2018.
According to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), many patients are unsure as to how to use the tool, particularly since it’s coming from a consumer-facing company. But they expect adoption to grow as patients become familiar with Apple Health Records and their providers do more to support the platform.
“It is anticipated that access to clinical data via Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs and use of this data by smartphone applications will allow individuals to better understand and control their health data, more easily ensure data accuracy, shop for high-value health care services, avoid the need to repeatedly supply data for entry into each new health care provider’s electronic health record, and increase their participation in clinical research,” the study concluded.
“However, because this capability is new, few applications are currently able to access and use the data. In addition, there has been little effort by healthcare systems or health information technology vendors to market this new capability to patients, and there are not clear incentives for patients to adopt it.”
That’s where Hekier sees his opportunity.
“This takes time, but it’s a step in the right direction,” he says, noting the app is just one more tool in a patient engagement toolkit for Sharp that includes the FollowMyHealth patient portal. “We’re looking to make the most use of the most valuable but – up until now – most overlooked part of healthcare – the patient.”
On one side, he said, Sharp – and any other health system tapping into Apple Health Records – has to teach its providers what to expect from their patients and how to guide those conversations. They’re now working with patients who have a lot more information about their health, but those patients may be overwhelmed with data or uncertain how to use it.
“Patients need the guidance to act on that data,” he says. They need to know what’s useful and how it can be used, and providers need to know how to offer that guidance.
Likewise, Hekier says, patients need to be taught how to use the data at their disposal, so that they’re entering the healthcare conversation with the right preparation. Too many doctor-patient encounters are derailed by a patient who’s asking all the wrong questions or a doctor who’s spending too much time ferreting information he/she should have already had.
“We’re trying to leverage all the tools at our disposal to close gaps in care,” he says. That means making sure everyone know how to use those tools in the first place.
As more health systems integrate Apple Health Records and other mHealth tools into the EHR platforms, Hekier says it’s important that doctors and nurses stay abreast of how these tools improve the patient experience. That means becoming comfortable with mHealth and telehealth before one expects the patient to do the same.
In addition, he’d like to see Apple go further with its mHealth platform, inching ever so close to that long-sought integration between consumer-facing uses and clinical uses. He’d like more channels for chronic care, bi-directional messaging and reminders.
Apple Health Records “was a foreseeable step in the evolution of healthcare,” he says. “We have to learn how to make the most of it … (and to) partner with patients in the improvement of their health and well-being.”
Source: mhealth Intelligence