Mobile

At the Mental Health Awareness Singapore Learning Series “Healthy Mind , Better Life” Seminar organised by charity group Brahm Centre held on 25th October, Dr. Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Health, announced the launch of the Dementia Friends mobile app. The app allows users to easily access information about dementia, receive updates on upcoming events on caregiving, and most importantly, use it to search for loved ones who have lost their way home. Since its soft launch, more than 1,500 mobile users have downloaded the app and signed up as Dementia Friends. The mobile app is co-developed by the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), Nanyang Polytechnic and IHiS (Integrated Health Information Systems), which is the national technology agency for healthcare in Singapore. “Caregivers can activate this network of Dementia Friends in times of crisis, as the community of Dementia friends can help to keep a lookout for loved ones once they get a notification from the app,” said Dr. Khor. She also said that to date, six Dementia-Friendly Communities (DFC) have been formed. DFCs are support networks that help seniors with dementia live and age well, as well as provide much needed support to caregivers. Under the DFC initiative, residents, grassroots leaders, business owners and frontline government agencies are trained to help persons with dementia and their families. The six DFCs are at Yishun, Hong Kah North, MacPherson, Queenstown, Fengshan and Bedok. The Dementia Friends mobile app is available for download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. In August, the National Institute on Aging in the US awarded a US$4.5 million grant to the University of California Berkeley and People Power, an IoT software provider, to support research on smart home solutions for caregivers of dementia patients. People Power is creating customised systems through behavioral research on targeting everyday stressors for caregivers and dementia patients. The new technology gives caregivers proactive alerts that identify abnormal qualities in patient activities.

Apps and devices will evolve and tools already around us will become instruments of health to advance tailor-made care delivery and treatments.

The market is so flooded with competing products that many people have trouble even understanding what's available.

Manal Almalki, of Jazan University in Saudi Arabia, is empowering patients to monitor their health at home so they can gain insights into their own body using wearables; the tool is also aggregating data during the patient-run experiments.

Bettina Experton, MD, and CEO of Humetrix, talks about the history of CMS’s Blue Button project and how 53 million Americans covered by Medicare will now have access to their data through an API to ensure patient safety and interoperability.

InterSystems has announced a new data and collaboration platform to enable application developers to more easily and efficiently access health data. The aim is to help healthcare organizations be more agile and effective in creating and scaling innovative apps. WHY IT MATTERS Healthcare is generating more digital data than ever before, but the enormous volume and variety of that information can also be overwhelming. IRIS for Health, a healthcare-specific offshoot of InterSystems' new IRIS Data Platform, seeks to offer a streamlined approach for developers to access and make use of that data, officials say – giving them analytics and interoperability tools to help in the creation of apps. To do this, the platform leverages HL7's fast-becoming-ubiquitous Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard – including FHIR Server and SMART on FHIR capabilities. It also supports all major interoperability standards and certifications (HL7 Versions 2 and 3, Consolidated CDA, IHE, DICOM, and others), as well as an extensible data model enabling transitions between those standards. THE BIGGER TREND New and innovative clinical applications – cloud-based decision support, mobile tools for patients, AI-powered analytics  – are proliferating everywhere, and fast becoming key enablers of care transformation. But for all the creative energy in the app ecosystem, the raw materials available to forward-thinking developers could be improved As we showed in our Focus on Innovation this past month, there's boundless great ideas out there, and while the basic infrastructure is there to enable developers' success, startups and upstarts in the app creation space need the larger industry to be thinking as creatively as they are. And as hospitals and health systems look to scale up their own IT innovations, moving them from pilot to production, InterSystems hopes its new platform, available starting in 2019, will enable them to realize these innovations faster and more efficiently. ON THE RECORD "The explosion of healthcare data has created a dire need for innovations that can help the industry keep pace with payer, provider, and patient expectations," said Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare at InterSystems, in a statement. "Healthcare needs a foundational data platform that enables cutting-edge applications to rapidly evolve from concept to reality," he added. "We’re helping healthcare developers bring applications from whiteboard to production faster." Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com

This case study shows how Hardin Memorial Hospital lowered that rate from 5.6 to 2.2 percent – and improved its HCAHPS scores thanks to better communication between doctors and patients.

While many readers are optimistic that healthcare will make progress on consumerism in one to three years, others said it will take between five and seven to actually happen.