Less than one year after BioTime subsidiary LifeMap Sciences spun off a mobile health company, LifeMap Solutions has embarked on a pilot study of its COPD Navigator with Mount Sinai Hospital, according to a company statement.
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and COPD experts from the Mount Sinai – National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute, developed the app with LifeMap Solutions.
The company’s COPD Navigator tracks patient data, including symptoms, medication, treatment adherence, and quality of life. That data is visualized to help patients understand patterns in their timeline and transmits the information to their physician. The app also helps patients steer clear of environmental risk factors by sending real-time alerts about local air quality and weather. National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute provided educational content.
In response to emailed questions, LifeMap Solutions CEO Corey Bridges said the goals of the pilot are to develop and tweak a product so that it best fits into physician workflows.
“The pilot program’s goal is to yield the best possible product, based on direct feedback from patients and respiratory doctors in real clinical settings. It’s not enough to simply throw technology at a medical problem. The solution absolutely has to take doctors’ existing workflows and processes into account and has to integrate as seamlessly as possible into those existing processes. Otherwise, care teams won’t adopt them. That’s why we’re building COPD Navigator in close partnership with the Mount Sinai – National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute.”
He added: “Stated in another way, the pilot program at the Respiratory Institute will provide valuable insight into COPD Navigator’s ability to improve self-management of the condition and will allow us to see which features prove most valuable in achieving this goal. The results from the pilot program will inform any necessary enhancements before the app becomes commercially available later this year.”
COPD affects 24 million people and is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Hospitals are under pressure to reduce readmission rates at the 30 day mark or face increasingly punitive fines in the form of Medicare reimbursement cuts. The idea is that digital tools that provide a way to remotely monitor the condition will help patients and physicians identify potential infections and factors complicating the condition earlier so intervention is more effective and less costly.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The navigator is the first part of LifeMap’s COPD management platform. It also includes Bluetooth-enabled inhaler technology and a clinician dashboard for care providers, the statement said. COPD Navigator supports Apple’s HealthKit technology and accepts inhaler usage data from any HealthKit-compliant, Bluetooth-enabled, connected inhaler. The next part of the collaboration will focus on developing the clinician facing dashboard.
In the pilot program at Mount Sinai, LifeMap Solutions is providing a smart device of its own design, allowing the app to know automatically when the patient has used their inhaler. That data helps the app track medication adherence and identify potential environmental and behavioral triggers of episodes that show a spike in worsening COPD symptoms. Identifying trends and individual triggers can help patients improve the overall quality of their health and avoid circumstances that worsen their condition.
The clinician dashboard is HIPAA-compliant and helps physicians track the health status of their patients. They can also use it to check a patient’s record to track their care plan adherence and symptoms. They can flag high-risk patients, set rules for events-based alerts, and intervene early with the goal of reducing the risk of acute exacerbations, the report said. The dashboard also helps providers send health alerts and reminders to patients.
“The analysis of the health outcomes and data captured from mHealth apps and devices informs the development of an expanded disease management platform,” said Eric Schadt, Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai in the statement.
There are several digital health and medical device companies active in the COPD space. Propeller Health, which raised more than $14 million in a Series B round last year, developed a way to use sensors on an inhaler to track its use and use data gathered from its devices to provide personalized feedback to users and ways to improve how they manage their condition. Last year, Philips announced a collaboration with Vital Connect and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands using a tiny, patch-like sensor from Vital Connect to remotely monitor COPD patients. It demonstrated the technology at the SXSW Health Expo.
Update: This story has been updated from an earlier version with information from LifeMap Solutions CEO Corey Bridges.
