Hamish MacDonald’s Healthy Approach to Data

The days of haphazardly following a GP’s advice will be over if New Zealander Hamish MacDonald’s health app The Diary has its way, The Australian reports.

Many of us fall victim to waning interest in following a doctor’s orders. It could be to change diet, lose weight, exercise more, take medications and monitor vital signs.

The Diary Corporation seeks both to record health information, encourage patients to follow-up plans and to report back patient progress. Information can be selectively shared by a patient, their GP, and others involved in their care, including family members.

The Diary consists of two smartphone apps. Care providers use The Diary CarePro app to set patient goals, seek patient engagement, and get information back about care plan adherence. It offers a means for different carers to coordinate their efforts around one patient.

The Diary app is used by patients to control access to their health information, and to gain insights into their health treatments. They enter their own monitoring data for carers to scrutinise.

The app works with Apple Health’s CareKit platform.

At a health app event in Sydney hosted by Apple, MacDonald said the app would replace a morass of emails, spreadsheets, documents, charts and records shared between carers involved with a single patient.

“When you unlock the patient data, you can unleash a level of care coordination that simply isn’t obtainable right now,” he said.

Original article by Chris Griffith, The Australian, May 16, 2017.

Photo by Wilma McCorkindale.