LifeMap Solutions has released a new COPD app developed in partnership with pulmonologists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai.
If that pairing sounds familiar, it’s because the same team – LifeMap and Mt. Sinai – developed Asthma Health, one of the first ResearchKit apps to launch earlier this year.
In just about 7 months, that app enrolled 8,400 participants into this longitudinal study on asthma. Soon after launch, a Doctor Dashboard feature was added to help participants share data with their physicians – in large part because app users asked for it.
COPD Navigator will focus on patients with (you guessed it) COPD and offer a very similar set of tools. Users can track symptoms and medications, share that data with their care team, and learn about COPD with curated educational material in the app. And like Asthma Health, this COPD app will integrate environmental data like air quality information and allergen levels to help users understand how those factors affect their symptoms and take preventive steps accordingly.
This COPD app will also be available as an enterprise version being branded as iBreathe, which will be deployed by disease management firm SuperCare Health. Data from the app will automatically feed into SuperCare’s EHR where their care managers will look for indicators of worsening so they can preemptively intervene.
And it’s likely that this EHR & care team integration will come to the consumer version of the app eventually. Earlier this year, LifeMap & Mt. Sinai announced that they would be piloting integration of Asthma Health with Epic.
It will be interesting to see how the data from the Asthma Health study has or will feed into both that app and COPD Navigator. For example, a few months ago, they reported some user engagement data that showed several interesting insights. First, and least surprisingly, engagement decreased over time with responses to daily prompts falling by half in about a month. More interestingly, users engagement with those prompts was consistently highest on Monday each week. Hopefully, that has fed into user interface designs that try to improve app “stickiness” over time and perhaps delivery of the most important, high impact information earlier in the week.
There are a number of new resources becoming available for the management of asthma & COPD like the smart inhalers that track usage of inhalers, both maintenance and rescue therapy. All together, that’s a lot of data that we’ll have available in near real-time – self-reported symptoms, medication usage, environmental data, activity data, and more – to help improve the way we manage these chronic conditions.
Download on iTunes.
