NEW YORK – September 29, 2015 – The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, a digital-health subsidiary of BioTime, Inc., today announced initial results and new clinical features for their free Asthma Health app. Released six months ago, the app enables individuals with asthma to participate in a large-scale medical research study by simply using their Apple iPhones. The app’s newest features—the “Doctor Dashboard” and integration with Epic, the popular electronic health records (EHR) system—will help enable Asthma Health study participants to use the app with their physicians.
“We are delighted with the initial results we’ve seen after six months of using Apple’s ResearchKit framework for our Asthma Health app,” said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. “We recruited and enrolled over 8,600 research participants in our study, remotely via the Asthma Health app without direct, in-person, contact. The breadth, depth, and quality of the data we’ve obtained, in one of the largest real-world epidemiological studies of asthma, has exceeded our expectations. Our experience demonstrates why mobile apps are fundamentally transforming medical research.”
“Studying the rich data from thousands of participants, we have found some preliminary but fascinating patterns regarding the usage of the app and activity level data collected from surveys and HealthKit. Also, our patients’ asthma triggers, medication usage, and clinical outcomes are of great interest,” said Yu-Feng Yvonne Chan, MD, PhD, Director of Digital Health and Personalized Medicine at the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. “Further, many of our study participants wrote to inform us that the app was serving as more than a research tool, or an educational tool, but was actually helping them better understand and manage their condition and feel better overall. This potential positive impact of our research study on the participants has inspired our team to introduce new features and enhancements to the Asthma Health app.”
Corey Bridges, CEO of LifeMap Solutions, explained. “We learned that some app users were showing their historical health data, as displayed in Asthma Health, to their doctors, in order to start very information-rich conversations. Inspired by these stories, we worked closely with our Mount Sinai colleagues to build an even more useful feature—the new Doctor Dashboard. Now, the patient just presses a button in the app and hands their iPhone to their provider. Within seconds, any provider can get a sense of the patient’s recent asthma condition, symptom control, and activity. Any patient can show their Doctor Dashboard to any care provider, anywhere.”
Bridges continued, “We’ve also integrated Asthma Health with Epic, the popular electronic health records (EHR) system, so that pulmonologists at Mount Sinai can order and obtain data from the Asthma Health app for their patients who are using it.”
“At Mount Sinai, we are working with our Respiratory Institute co-investigators to pilot the integration of data from the Asthma Health app with our Epic EHR system,” said Dr. Chan. “We believe that the addition of rich, longitudinal data from our asthma patients into their electronic health records may be of great value to the pulmonologists and other clinicians providing care. Over time, we plan to expand this EHR integration at Mount Sinai.”
Said Bridges, “We’re thrilled and humbled that our research app is being utilized in this way. We look forward to helping other care providers and medical centers around the country do the same, to benefit as many asthma patients as possible. And we’re incorporating the learnings from Asthma Health into our future digital health apps.”
The Asthma Health app is available for free download in the Apple App Store; for more information visit http://icahn.mssm.edu/asthmaapp.
Other Epic community members can learn more about how LifeMap and Mount Sinai’s Asthma Health app integrates with the Epic EHR and how they can leverage the app to collect asthma data from their own patients by viewing this document on the Epic UserWeb.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven member hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient services—from community‐based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care.
The System includes approximately 6,600 primary and specialty care physicians, 12‐minority‐owned free‐standing ambulatory surgery centers, over 45 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, and Long Island, as well as 31 affiliated community health centers. Physicians are affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is ranked among the top 20 medical schools both in National Institutes of Health funding and by U.S. News & World Report.
For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org, or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
About LifeMap Solutions, Inc.
LifeMap Solutions is developing innovative digital health products in partnership with the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, which is located within the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. LifeMap digital therapeutic solutions integrate health and wellness information with care team guidance into a secure mHealth platform that empowers the patient to make better choices to achieve optimal health outcomes. LifeMap Solutions is a subsidiary of BioTime, Inc. LifeMap Solutions is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, please visitwww.lifemap-solutions.com.
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Contacts:
Glenn Farrell for Mount Sinai
650-690-1598
TriplePoint for LifeMap Solutions
415-955-8500
Dan L. Lawrence for BioTime
510-775-0510
dlawrence@biotimemail.com
Gotham Communications for BioTime
Bill Douglass, 646-504-0890