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Have a look at “Charmr” – a very cool design concept for a PHR-type of device for diabetes patients. Amy Tenderich, who writes a blog on diabetes, articulated the need for more user-friendly devices for diabetes management. Design firm Adaptive Path answered the challenge. See a video clip of the charmr in action and read the story behind it.
Riding the wave of iPhone-mania, recently a PHR company (MedeFile) made a public claim that its service works on the iPhone. Though as blogger Matthew Holt points out, given that the iPhone offers access to any content on the Internet, the claim isn’t such an impressive one. Nevertheless, since most Americans now have cell phones—and indeed there are nearly as many mobile as traditional phones—their use as a means to access PHR applications is likely to become more common.
Project HealthDesign grantees are ahead of the trend. In their effort to integrate PHRs as unobtrusively as possible into patients’ everyday lives, several of the nine teams have chosen to use cell phones as a platform for PHR access.
For example, a team at Univeristy of Washington University is working to enable ongoing communication between patients with chronic illness and their providers via cell phone. The hope is that regular monitoring will minimize crises and help patients to feel better on a daily basis. The team is developing a device that lets patients with diabetes record their blood glucose levels, blood pressure, food intake and exercise patterns and send them wirelessly, by cell phone, to their providers, who feed the data into a medical record and provide advice and feedback to patients as necessary.
Meanwhile, another Project HealthDesign team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is designing a personal digital assistant (PDA) that uses prompts to remind patients with chronic pain to take their medicines and enables patients to record, share and visually analyze a record of their symptoms over time.
PHR access via cell phone is a logical idea that will soon get a push from a new source of funding. On September 15th, Microsoft plans to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) titled "Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare." The $700,000 RFP, targeted at academic institutions, calls for research that examines mobile phone health applications for rural, urban and worldwide communities and determines the infrastructures necessary to support them. See the blog by Microsoft's worldwide health director, Bill Crounse, M.D. for more details.
Project HealthDesign National Advisory Committee member David Lansky, executive director of the Markle Foundation’s Personal Health Technology Initiative, was interviewed by Digital HealthCare & Productivity on why fragmentation across PHR products—and the systems they operate within—continues to undermine their potential for helping patients to really take charge of their health in a meaningful way. Lansky says,
"We appreciate all these electronic tools but it doesn’t add up to an empowered consumer until the network environment permits information to flow into a tool that the consumer controls and manages."
The full Q&A is available here.
