By Sara Heath
- Commercial lab provider LabCorp has partnered with The Commons Project to ease patient access to health data and lab results via their smartphones, the companies have announced.
The partnership will allow patients to view their lab results using CommonHealth, an Android app that functions akin to a digital personal health record. Android rolled out CommonHealth in partnership with The Commons Project in 2019 to bring patient data access to individuals using Android phones.
This partnership will let patients use CommonHealth, which The Commons Project said is available in the Google Play app store, to collect, store, and disseminate their laboratory data via their Android smartphones. This effort makes patients arbiters of their own health data and is key to empowerment, experts agree.
“The healthcare landscape has evolved dramatically over the past few months, with consumers requesting faster and easier access to their health information,” Mark Wright, senior vice president of IT Customer Products at LabCorp, said in a statement.
“By enabling patients to integrate their test results with CommonHealth, consumers can securely access their results and share them at their discretion with doctors, telehealth providers, schools, employers and others whom they may want to have access to this information.”
This partnership comes as patients and providers increasingly see the transition to remote, technology-enabled healthcare. Patients are increasingly accessing healthcare via telehealth and using remote patient monitoring devices, proving a need to integrate all of their medical information into a singular, shareable, digital location.
“There has never been more need for people to safely access and manage their health data,” said Paul Meyer, CEO of The Commons Project. “With the acceleration of remote medicine and telehealth, patients and providers need easy access to trusted lab data to make informed medical decisions.”
CommonHealth accomplishes this by letting patients plug in their different health-related apps, including their EHRs, and pool their data in CommonHealth. From there, patients may choose to share their CommonHealth data with entities they see fit, like new providers or family caregivers.
“CommonHealth allows people to securely gather their health data right on their phones – not wrestle with complicated and closed off electronic health record systems,” said JP Pollak, PhD, co-founder and chief architect of The Commons Project. “This integration with LabCorp, a world leader in diagnostic testing, is the latest example of how The Commons Project is working to give more people access and control over their health data, in a way that puts their interests first.”
As noted above, The Commons Project developed CommonHealth with Android to give smartphone users a place to digitally aggregate their own medical information. According to Pollak, CommonHealth stemmed from some of the industry excitement around another, separate patient data access project: Apple Health Records.
“Apple has shown real leadership and moved the industry forward by enabling patient access to their health information. Now CommonHealth is significantly expanding the number of people who can benefit from easy electronic access to their health records,” Pollak said at the time of the announcement.
Pollak and the team at The Commons Project have worked to emphasize the security protections in place on CommonHealth. This comes as experts across the country cite security concerns when discussing aggregated medical records.
CommonHealth has patients opt into sharing certain types of medical information, and does not share patient data with third parties without explicit patient consent.
This timing for the CommonHealth and LabCorp deal is strategic. When CommonHealth and Apple Health Records first came on the scene, they merely represented a good solution to some of healthcare’s data access problems.
But as Meyer pointed out, COVID-19 and the push for more remote care has offered a key use case for virtual platforms enabling patient data access. These types of personal health records, as well as patient portals, might be an opportunity to let patients be in control of coordinating their own care.
"Smartphone" - Google News
October 15, 2020 at 08:30PM
https://ift.tt/37cjkEq
LabCorp, CommonHealth Partner for Smartphone Patient Data Access - PatientEngagementHIT.com
"Smartphone" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QXWyGT
https://ift.tt/2KSW0PQ
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "LabCorp, CommonHealth Partner for Smartphone Patient Data Access - PatientEngagementHIT.com"
Post a Comment