Power to the Patients
Medical records have always been kept in the strictest of confidence, to be safely held by the doctors and shared with the patients when necessary. However, there has been a recent change in the management of medical records and it’s giving more power to the patients themselves.
“It’s really strange to me that you can easily pull up all of your spending record on your credit card going back a long way in every detail, yet your health is way more important and you don’t have easy access to your health information.”
Unfortunately, many patients are all too familiar with the complicated process of accessing their medical records. According to The Economist, 250,000 Americans dies each year due to medical error with a significant portion of those deaths being attributed to poorly coordinated care. There is hope to resolve this issue; Apple recently announced an addition to their popular iPhone Health app that will allow patients to download and see parts of their medical records on their phone. While this may sound like an alarmingly casual way to handle sensitive information, dozens of medical institutions — including Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles — have already signed on to beta test the new feature. “It’s really strange to me that you can easily pull up all of your spending record on your credit card going back a long way in every detail, yet your health is way more important and you don’t have easy access to your health information,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer in an interview with the New York Times. “We want to make sure that consumers are empowered with information about their health.”
PEAR Therapeutics is another company utilizing phones in their patient care. Working as a bridge between doctors and patients, PEAR aims to use prescription digital therapeutics to help people suffering from substance abuse. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, PEAR’s technology is a digitized form of cognitive behavioral therapy, which examines the relationships between thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Given FDA clearance in September, 2017 PEAR’s lead product, reSET, actually became the first prescription digital therapeutic cleared for the treatment of substance use disorder. With patient-facing clinical assessment and outcomes tracking, clinician monitoring dashboards and HIPAA-compliant data storage, PEAR hopes to make communication between doctor and patient a little smoother.
Akili Interactive Labs, a startup founded by neuroscientists and entertainment software creators, is putting medical care in patient’s hands — through video game controllers. Looking to get a cut of the $13 billion spent on ADHD treatment, Akili has developed an interactive, video game called PROJECT: EVO that will act as a therapy treatment. While EVO presents as a whimsical game, it’s actually a sophisticated software that uses adaptive algorithms to customize the experience for each player. While they are still awaiting FDA approval, Akili plans to deliver treatment using art, music, storytelling and reward cycles to keep patients engaged.
Even the National Institute of Health is getting in on the trend. In 2016, $130 million was allocated to NIH and they used this funding to launch their Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). They are combining the latest genomic research with emerging methods for collecting and analyzing data to deliver curated preventative care and medical treatment. In order to make this ambitious project work they need massive amounts of data, which is where you come in!
A major element of PMI is their “All of Us” program, which has a national roll-out planned for Spring 2018. NIH is asking people to join this program and grant them access to their medical and personal history. Over a long period of time, participants will be asked about their health, family, home and work. PMI will collect this information and use it to measure the risk for a range of diseases based on environmental exposures, develop new disease classifications, and discover biological markers that signal increased or decreased risk of developing common diseases, just to name a few.
While this is a massive project, and it will take several years of collecting data before we’ll see any real results, “All of Us” and PMI has the potential to completely change the way patients are treated by their doctors.
Big data is slowly, but surely, breaking into the medical field. While we are comfortable using our phones and laptops for everything from banking to grocery shopping, it makes sense that the next step should be our healthcare.
