Carolinas HealthCare System, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has produced possibly the first mobile app that directly integrates data from both an institutional electronic health record and from consumer fitness trackers.
Carolinas quietly released the myCarolinas Tracker app months ago. for both Android and Apple iOS. Very quietly, apparently.
“I’m certain if an app like this was created at a hospital in Silicon Valley or New York it would be getting all types of buzz,” Dr. Iltifat Hussein wrote Tuesday on his iMedicalApps blog. “The MyCarolina [sic] Tracker app has the potential to do something no health app has yet — actually take data from wearables and make it clinically relevant for millions of patients and their physicians.”
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The app connects with Carolinas’ EHR and can pull in real-time data from at least 25 fitness trackers, plus three commercially available pulse oximeters and seven models of Bluetooth blood-pressure cuffs, iMedicalApps reported. It also syncs with RunKeeper to add workout data to the mix, according to Carolinas, and is integrated with health diary app Moves.
Carolinas refers to its EHR program as “Canopy.” The health system’s IT infrastructure is a hodgepodge of technology mostly from Cerner, but with some hospitals on McKesson and Epic Systems EHRs. Having the myCarolinas Tracker app gives the organization a level of interoperability that others with a single EHR vendor don’t have.
The app first was released to Google Play in March. The Apple version was updated in late September.
