A former Boeing software engineer with asthma started a company a few years back to develop mobile health apps from the patient’s point of view. Joshua Dees developed OSIA Medical‘s lead app Asthma Ally in 2013 .
OSIA Medical rolled out a second app earlier this month at HIMSS. Health Ally will provide a template for apps for specific conditions such as diabetes, heart failure, hypertension and depression and anxiety.
In a phone interview with Dees, he talked about the challenge of growing up with childhood asthma only for the asthma to return after a motorcycle accident. Asthma Ally also factors in environmental information since it plays a role in asthma attacks. The idea for Health Ally template is that, like Asthma Ally, it will combine personal data with other relevant data to provide users with useful insights to help them manage their condition. Dees hopes the apps will help patients take a more active role in their care and help them work with physicians to develop a better understanding of how best to manage their asthma and other chronic conditions.
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The company has spent the past couple of years building healthcare and health IT partners. It is working with Cerner and other electronic medical record providers to integrate its app. It has also worked with Intermountain Allergy and Asthma and Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
Although patient engagement apps have captured a lot of interest, asthma apps in particular have been a source of innovation by different companies hoping to make life easier for this patient population, such as Propeller Health, as well as product design developers, and gaming companies.
Dees outlined some of the milestones he hopes the company will reach this year. “I would like to drive the adoption rate. I would like to include a few more larger institutions. I would also like to add clinical validation and performance metrics that are important to other patients and improve upon that.”
OSIA Medical has been pretty quiet about its work until relatively recently. That has a lot to do with Dees background at Boeing (his former boss at Boeing is now his CIO) and a work culture that demands its developers get it right the first time. “When we started this company, we held ourselves to a high standard to make sure what we’ve built is close to what patients want and expect.”
