Iatric Systems Inc, a healthcare IT integration company, has announced that it will make use of the Apple Health iPhone app to help hospitals drive patient engagement. The company says it has undertaken the integration of Apple Health with an EHR-neutral approach that pulls and presents patient data from a range of sources, including patients, hospital inpatient, and ambulatory. On November 18, Iatric Systems reported that the first two hospitals to engage its enterprise-wide integration of the Apple Health app are Memorial Healthcare, in Owosso, Michigan; and King’s Daughters Medical Center, in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
According to Iatric Systems, the move by hospitals to use a more patient-centric tool like Apple Health was driven by both meaningful use requirements and a desire to involve patients in their own care. The patient-engagement approach is aimed at helping patients stay healthier overall, and have better outcomes when they do become ill.
“We envision our patients using Apple Health easily because for many, the iPhone is already a main part of their lives,” said Frank Fear, vice president of Ancillary Services/CIO at Memorial Healthcare. “We needed to make the self-empowerment tool easy for our patients to access. Iatric Systems was a natural fit because their portal integrates across all of our systems, giving us one tool for capturing and sending data to patients, and eventually, receiving data back from them.”
Iatric Systems, which refers to itself as a “vendor-agnostic” integration company, states that it offers providers a range of applications and solutions from different sources, such as Apple Health, to help advance their patient engagement capabilities. Iatric Systems links data from EHRs, physician practices, and standalone departmental solutions, and presents that data in one view for providers and patients. Patients can use these apps to view, download, and transmit their health data back to providers. Worth noting is that the Apple Health app for patients is an aggregator—it pulls information from a patient’s other health apps, displaying it all in one dashboard.
To learn more about how the integration of Apple Health helps hospitals expand patient engagement, visit the Iatric Systems website.
Photo copyright © Pressureua | Dreamstime.com
