Health Systems Eye EHR-Based Telehealth Toolkit for IBD Treatment

Four health systems are launching a program to identify and use telehealth and mHealth tools within the electronic health record to help patients living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Mount Sinai Health System, Cleveland Clinic, Northwestern University Health System and University of California at Davis Health System will be developing an IBD Digital Therapeutics Toolkit to help care providers identify the best connected health treatments that don’t disrupt clinical workflows.

The project aims to develop connected health pathways within the EHR to improve care management and coordination at home, and to use tools like mHealth apps, telemedicine tools and remote patient monitoring platforms to boost care outcomes.

“Our hypothesis is that medical homes supported by a unified EHR-connected platform and automated IBD-specific digital interventions will translate to a sustainable improvement in population health outcomes,” Ashish Atreja, CIO and chief digital health officer at UC Davis Health and co-principal investigator of the NIH grant, said in a press release. “By leveraging the efficiency and scalability of digital health and AI, we hope to create a national model for proactive and comprehensive care for every single IBD patient.”

The four-phase project will eventually lead to a pilot program to test the toolkit among roughly 1,500 patients living with IBD.

The project will build off of research done by Mount Sinai, which has been using telehealth to treat patients with chronic conditions like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease for several years.