Health IT stakeholders in Canada want to find out how mobile tools can improve diabetes management in the clinical care environment.
To that end, a program initiated by WellDoc, Samsung and the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), will evaluate the use of WellDoc's Type 2 diabetes self-management BlueStar solution via integration with Samsung's S Health platform.
The BlueStar-S offering will let individuals monitor fitness, nutrition and sleep, and provides each user with a customized management program, according to an announcement.
The technology will be provided to patients at two hospitals and outpatients clinics in Toronto, which are affiliated with OTN, a government-funded nonprofit tasked with delivering telehealth/digital health solutions.
The decision to target Type 2 diabetes centers around the prevalence of the disease, Kevin McRaith, WellDoc CEO, told FierceMobileHealthcare.
"WellDoc initially focused on diabetes and, specifically, Type 2 diabetes because of the size of the market, its unfortunate growth rate and the extent to which the broader healthcare system was struggling to cope with it," he wrote in an email.
In addition, the disease has the "greatest unmet need for self-management tools that deliver improved clinical outcomes to patients and providers," McRaith said.
The announcement comes two months after Samsung stated it was teaming up with Medtronic to develop mobile apps to provide insight and access on diabetes data for Medtronic's MiniMed Connect. And earlier this year, Samsung joined up with Partners HealthCare in a multi-phase mobile tech initiative, with the first project focused on creating remote mHealth apps and spurring clinical research for chronic disease management.
McRaith said that by providing individuals easy approaches to managing healthcare, patients can be empowered and "get back in the driver's seat" of their own care plan.
For more information:
- read the WellDoc announcement (.pdf)