Boston-based Partners HealthCare is working on an effort to provide its clinicians and researchers with access to patient-generated health data (PGHD) from over 420 consumer and clinical health devices.
Working with Durham, N.C.-based vendor Validic, Partners Connected Health is planning to integrate PGHD into care plans and the electronic health record (EHR) throughout the Partners HealthCare network in 2018. Validic’s Inform platform provides a single connection point for ingesting patient data from hundreds of in-home clinical devices, consumer health applications, and wearables.
“This collaboration will allow patients to share personal health data with their care team seamlessly and securely using their own consumer devices. Of even greater significance is the ability to make this data actionable and provide evidence-based care to improve clinical efficiencies, empower patients and strengthen the patient provider relationship,” said Kelly Santomas, M.S., R.N., senior director, connected health solutions, Partners Connected Health, in a prepared statement. “This has implications throughout patient care, including improved management of chronic illness and at-risk patient populations.”
The broader goal of this collaboration is to bring patients’ device data – from wearables, blood pressure monitors, blood glucose monitors and other home health devices – directly into the existing clinical workflows and the EHR. Learning from pilots and early rollouts, Partners Connected Health will work with Validic to determine how home health devices and actionable, standardized and HIPPAA-compliant patient-generated health data can fit within existing care plans.
In the current pilot phase, Partners Connected Health is testing a cloud-based digital health platform with blood pressure monitoring. “This new data platform enables our clinicians to quickly and securely access patient generated data via our EHR system, in a format that is standardized, actionable and HIPAA compliant,” added Roger Pasinski, M.D., Mass General Hospital, Revere HealthCare Center, in a statement. “Our patients and providers are eager to leverage personal health technologies to enhance care coordination, patient engagement and better collaboration between patients and providers to improve care delivery and clinical outcomes.”
