Untethered personal health records simply don’t work. Companies large and small have tried and failed for years to get consumers to manage their own health records by manually entering data, and those consumers have failed to get their healthcare providers to take the time to read what they have entered.
Plenty of PHR vendors have gone out of business, while others have adjusted their business models. Put Baltimore-based startup ICmed in the latter camp.
“We’re not trying to solve the personal health records problem,” nor is ICmed fighting the larger interoperability battle, ICmed Chief Evangelist — effectively the chief marketing officer — Yaya Fanusie said. “We want families to start sharing information.”
ICMed is getting ready to release the first update to its mobile app since 2011, and it’s radically different from the existing version, reflecting the growth in social media and team-based care in the last four years. The company calls the forthcoming update a “family health platform,” with which users will be able to share all or parts of their health information with loved ones and caregivers in a private network.
CEO Anil Kshepakaran said that this sharing happens via a proprietary “family tree,” function. Users might choose to share information about a history of heart disease, then the app will apply artificial intelligence in the cloud and offer “mentorship” — lifestyle and health coaching — to members of the patient’s family group.
“It’s the same mode of interacting as social media,” Fanusie said.
Kshepakaran likened the new ICmed to Waze, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app that continually updates road conditions and travel times, and Mint, the personal financial management service that lets people share bill summaries with spouses or roommates.”ICmed helps you navigate your health in the same fashion,” he said.
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.
ICmed expects to make its money by serving up sponsored content based on individual health needs. Users have to give informed consent to satisfy HIPAA privacy regulations.
There still is a PHR component, as the updated app will be able to synchronize multiple records for the same patient from different providers in hopes of creating a more complete history and medication list, Kshepakaran said. “We are investigating Blue Button integration,” he added.
Expect the new ICmed app to hit iTunes and Google Play by the end of the year, Kshepakaran said. It also will work on the Apple Watch.
He said that a beta version of the update has found “thousands of users” in just a couple of weeks. The existing 2011 app has gained only 5,000 users in four years, though the company didn’t really promote it, Fanusie said.
Photo: ICmed
