App for cancer patients launches on Apple Watch to transform care quality
Fri 24 Apr 2015
Healthcare tech firm Medopad has today announced the global launch of its Apple Watch chemotherapy app, with cancer patients at London’s King’s College Hospital the first to trial the solution.
The app is already deployed in active-care settings around the world, including NHS hospitals and private health facilities. However, now taking advantage of the Apple Watch, the firm hopes to support the effective treatment of patients by providing a user-friendly management tool for keeping track of strict drug programmes, recording symptoms and side effects, and communicating confidentially with doctors.
“Cancer treatment is a challenging journey. Adherence to complicated treatment regimens, and the streamlined recording and reporting of health issues during treatment are of paramount value,” said Dr Siamak Arami of King’s College Hospital. He added that the Apple Watch app could “transform the quality and safety of care for patients, carers and care providers [and] eventually reduce the cost and improve the outcome of treatment for cancer patients.”
Arami explained that doctors would be able to amend and tailor drug programmes in real-time according to the feedback provided by the app users. He suggested that there was also a significant cost benefit as increased patient-doctor communication would reduce side effect-related hospital visits which equates to savings in staffing and other overheads.
The firm hopes that the data could provide doctors and hospitals with valuable insight and an opportunity to investigate ways to lower operational costs while improving overall care quality.
Dan Vahdat, CTO at Medopad, also commented that the data collected via the application could be “leveraged by pharmaceutical organisations looking for real-world insight into the effectiveness of specific drugs.”
He added that insurance companies and policy holders could also benefit from the data. “The application provides tangible evidence that patients are maintaining their regimens, while compliant policy holders can be rewarded and incentivised accordingly.”
