The Sinai AppLab, a pioneering digital initiative between the departments of Medicine and Information Technology, is creating technology platforms to address the needs of patients, health care providers, and researchers within the Mount Sinai Health System. Under the direction of Ashish Atreja, MD, MPH, Chief Technology Innovation and Engagement Officer in the Department of Medicine, the lab has developed five apps and an app platform that connect to Mount Sinai’s Electronic Health Records (EHR).
HealthPROMISE, the flagship app that is being funded by the National Institutes of Health, enables patients to report symptoms and quality-of-life indicators that help doctors track their health. It is currently being used in a trial of 300 Mount Sinai patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and has been adopted at major U.S. medical centers, including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, University of Miami Health System, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
The additional apps include Inform Health, a novel social bookmarking app for patient education; Team4Cure, a patient-centric clinical trial recruitment platform; Sinai eBook, which publishes many e-books detailing Mount Sinai’s protocols and policies; and Health Bundle, which prepares patients for upcoming procedures and surgeries and tracks their outcomes. The HealthPROMISE, Inform Health, Team4Cure, and Sinai eBook apps are currently live and can be customized for various specialties. The apps operate on iOS and Android devices, and on the Web.
In addition to monitoring a patient’s health, the HealthPROMISE app alerts the doctor and patient when symptoms begin to worsen. The physician can then call the patient to discuss, or schedule an office visit to preempt the need for hospitalization.
“We don’t know how patients are doing 99 percent of the time—only what we learn during office visits,” says Dr. Atreja, who is also Assistant Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We can provide much more proactive care if we link patient-generated data with our EHRs.”
The Sinai AppLab is also collaborating with The Office of Interventional Cardiovascular Research and Clinical Trials at the Icahn School of Medicine to create a digital questionnaire for doctors and 2,500 patients with atrial fibrillation in the United States and Europe. The goal is to help figure out the best drug combinations for patients who require coronary stent implantation.
“This will be a novel application of this technology in a real-world population of patients undergoing PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention),” says Usman Baber, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For patients undergoing PCI, commonly known as angioplasty, “We’re going to get information that’s not routinely captured, yet is very important to understanding decision-making and how it influences future risk in our patients.”
Plans this year for the Sinai AppLab include embedding videoconferencing capability within the apps to facilitate communication between doctors and patients; connecting the apps to wearable devices that track medical signs and symptoms; and creating a patient-to-patient social networking platform (HealthPROMISE Community) that allows patients to chat anonymously with each other about their health issues.
“Our goal is to collaborate with each specialty so Mount Sinai takes a lead in developing and evaluating iTunes, Android, and Web apps for all major chronic diseases,” Dr. Atreja says. “Our philosophy is that no patient gets left behind at Mount Sinai Health System.”