Health IT, Startups

Doctella wants to help payers and providers build patient-facing apps

Doctella's approach seeks to cut out the need for hospitals to hire their own software developers, adding to a growing number of health tech toolboxes as healthcare organizations seek new ways to monitor and study their patients through digital health tools.

Doctella’s CareProgram apps through its health studio can be used to help providers send alerts to patients with educational content.

As Apple and other technology businesses have rolled out programs to make it easier for clinicians to build their own healthcare apps, the cofounders of physician-led startup Patient Doctor Technologies Inc. spotted an opportunity. Even as healthcare professionals embrace health technology, they might lack the skills to develop apps to support their own approach to early interventions to reduce the cost of care. That’s how health studio Doctella was born.

The “health studio” is for physicians and other healthcare professionals interested in providing their own apps for their patients but who lack the software development knowhow to use Apple’s CareKit or HealthKit, Google Fit and cloud APIs for medical grade Internet of Medical Things. It is also intended to address those hospitals and practices that don’t have the budget to develop these apps internally.

The studio enables providers to send their CareProgram apps to one patient and integrates that information for patients to make it easy for them to access the data. It also helps healthcare professionals automate the tracking of their patients’ status, compliance, and feedback.

The cofounders include Dr. Adil Haider is a surgeon and professor with Brigham and Women’s Hospital/ Harvard Medical School and technology entrepreneur Amer Haider, the CEO and his brother. Peter Pronovost is a professor of anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the senior vice president of patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Doctella offers hundreds of templates it refers to as CarePrograms in primary care and medical specialties focused on patients that collect sensor data, patient feedback and deliver healthcare content. There are a couple of ways providers can work with Doctella. They can either design their own branded and personalized CarePrograms online or they can hire Doctella digital health experts to help them, the news release noted.

The rationale behind Doctella is that it’s an easier and cost-effective way to provide hospitals and payers with the tools their staff need to support the shift to value-based care. Why add to the fragmentation of apps from different companies with their own data silos when a toolbox can give more options?

Doctella claims it can develop apps that can automatically track reported outcomes, vitals, exercise routines, pain monitoring, and prescriptions, a company news release said.

A dermatology practice can use a CareProgram to provide a framework for sharing biopsy results with patients that are accompanied with useful and relevant information and a video or how patients can comprehend those results. orthopedic surgeon could enlist Doctella’s services for a knee replacement surgery countdown to deliver timely reminders on how to prepare for the procedure, recuperate from it and warning signs to be on the alert for.

“It is really not about the use case, it is about the desire by the provider and [health system] to use digital health interventions. That desire comes from the belief that the only way to complement value-based systems is to empower the patient so they know what to do and when to do it,” cofounder and CEO Amer Haider said in a phone interview.

Doctella isn’t the only toolbox available to clinicians. OpenmHealth is a nonprofit startup that wants to address the challenge of helping clinicians integrate and bring clinical meaning to standardized data. It also provides a way for clinicians to access and integrate patients’ digital health data from the APIs of fitness tracking companies such as RunKeeper, Fitbit, Google and Apple.

TrialX launched an Appbakery to support the construction of apps geared for researchers studying mhealth technology. They can use TrialX’s Appbakery to collect patient-reported and generated health data to monitor lifestyle, psychosocial behavior, fitness, nutrition, and sleep among other areas.

 

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