Kaiser executives highlight potential for interactive, preventive care through a brand new generation of mobile apps — but how one can get patients to opt in?
Remote Patient Monitoring: 9 Promising Technologies
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A young mother, Aashima Gupta, was returning home to Oakland from a ski trip to the Sierra Nevada, when her husband, who was driving, complained of drowsiness. She found a map to the closest Starbucks on her smartphone, and the family turned off busy Interstate 80 to get coffee. In three minutes, they were there.
She got her husband’s coffee and two cookies for sleepy kids within the back seat. They were back on Route 80 when she realized her seven-year-old daughter, with a nut allergy, was showing the hives round her mouth that were the 1st sign of an hypersensitivity. She was eating a cookie with nuts in it. With a start, Gupta asked herself, what had she done. How had she missed something she was always on guard against?
It was 11:00 p.m., they were all tired, and any nearby doctor’s offices or clinics were closed. Now disaster beckoned unless they are able to quickly find an emergency room with the EpiPen, an auto-injector of epinephrine, the antidote to the swelling that closes off an allergic child’s air passages.
[ Want more about how Kaiser Permanente spread out its location API? See Kaiser API Opens Healthcare Data To Mobile Apps. ]
Gupta again turned to her smartphone but couldn’t discover a guide to emergency rooms within the area. She switched to calling hospital switchboards directly and over a higher 25 minutes, contacted three before finding the single with an emergency room that was open. The family was soon enroute.
“How can or not it’s really easy to seek out the closest Starbucks but not the closest emergency room?” asked Gupta, who posed the question to 40 developers and software architects on the i like APIs conference in San Francisco November 5. Gupta could be able to answer the question for future families in distress. She is now executive director of technology incubation and innovation for Kaiser Permanente, the enormous medical health insurance and healthcare cooperative based in Oakland, and was a speaker on the API conference.
In an interview afterward, she said it is necessary at some point for healthcare providers to position the best tools into the hands of customers. “All i wished was timely information,” she recalled. Healthcare providers must extend what they already know out to consumers to assist them “correlate information in meaningful ways,” she said.
Kaiser has taken its first step toward doing that, and it plans more. In June, it released an API that provides external developers access to the placement and hours information of its hospitals, clinics, and physician offices. Kaiser is an integrated health provider with pharmacies at lots of its hospital locations, and labs and other facilities on a single campus. To aid patients make appointments, find offices and facilities, and fill prescriptions, it’s created an Android and iOS application that use the API to present information to patients.
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