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Mobile technology company Diversinet has launched the MobiHealth Wallet, an application that provides a way for patients to download their personal health records to their smartphones using the federal Blue Button data automation tool so they can share them with their doctors.
Diversinet announced the MobiHealth Wallet at the mHealth Summit in National Harbor, Md., on Dec. 3.
Developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Blue Button allows patients to download their personal health information as a PDF or text file. Federal agencies, health care providers, payers and pharmacy chains are adopting Blue Button.
The MobiHealth Wallet provides an interoperable framework for patients to store, manage and share their health data from their personal health portal with multiple providers. It allows doctors, case workers and patients to share data and engage on mobile devices through voice calls, email or text messages.
Using the Diversinet tool, patients can create and edit profiles that include their health lifestyle preferences. Doctors use the profiles along with information from medication adherence and mood-tracker tools to study patients’ health patterns.
The goal of the MobiHealth Wallet is to understand how patients change their health behaviors, Dr. Hon Pak, Diversinet’s CEO, told eWEEK.
By collecting health data in a standardized way from personal health records (PHRs), doctors can perform predictive analytics and gain an understanding of patients’ health behaviors, he said.
Changing health behaviors can reduce the occurrences of chronic diseases by about 80 percent, according to the World Health Organization.
The MobiHealth Wallet links with Diversinet’s Web-based portal, which stores a copy of patients’ PHR data.
For medical data to be shared by providers, health organizations are currently forming health information exchanges, but the Diversinet MobiHealth Wallet is a way to share additional lifestyle data found in patients’ PHRs, Pak noted.
“We’re providing patient-centric data interoperability to help providers not in the network or not in the same system to have access to the data through the wallet in ways that have not have been possible,” said Pak.
Doctors will be able to capture patient data not present in an EHR, such as exercise, sleep and dietary habits, Diversinet reported. They’ll also be able to store data such as weight, blood pressure and glucose readings from day to day. The PHR also stores information on allergies, health insurance, data, lab results and psychosocial conditions, such as anxiety and depression.
To complete their PHRs, patients participate in surveys about their health lifestyles and can update them over time.
The MobiHealth Wallet is available on all mobile OS platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows Phone, said Pak.
Diversinet plans to release a second version of the MobiHealth Wallet within a month or two, Pak said. The company will expand the MobiHealth Wallet to offer an engagement model featuring additional patient-generated preferences and social determinants of a patient’s health.
On Oct. 25, Diversinet announced an upgrade to its MobiSecure mobile-health platform to strengthen the security as doctors and patients message with each other electronically.