Telehealth, mHealth Featured in Projects and Studies Across the Country

With interest high in connected health these days, health systems are scrambling to partner with vendors to test out new technologies for remote patient management and care.

In North Carolina, Wake Forest Baptist Health is expanding a year-long pilot program launched this past April with Scanwell to equip at-risk patients with an mHealth platform to test at home for antibodies associated with the coronavirus. Through the expansion, some 200.000 connected health kits will be delivered to patients of Wake Forest Baptist Health as well as Atrium Health, WakeMed, Vidant Health, New Hanover Regional Medical Center and the Campbell University Osteopathic School of Medicine.

The mHealth platform enables patients to test at home, then fill out a daily online questionnaire about possible exposure, symptoms and healthcare visits. The answers and test results are then integrated with the patient’s medical record for online review by care providers.

Meanwhile, the Scripps Research Translational Institute has announced a partnership with the American College Health Association to expand the ongoing All of Us Research Program to five college campuses across the country.

The project, launched in 2015 by the National Institutes of Health and SRTI, aims to gain personal health data from at least 1 million participants - through surveys, electronic health records, physical measurements, biosamples and digital health technologies – to healthcare providers and researchers improve the ability to prevent and treat disease based on individual differences in lifestyle, environment and genetics.

The program includes mHealth companies like Fitbit, which announced its partnership with the NIH in January 2019.

“Most of what researchers know is based on intermittent snapshots of health in an artificial setting or based on personal recall,” added Steven Steinhubl, MD, a cardiologist and then-Director of Digital Medicine at SRTI. “Through this research program, we’ll have access to comprehensive activity, heart rate and sleep data that may help us better understand the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and health outcomes and what that means for patients on an individualized basis.”

In the new partnership with the ACHA, students at Albion College, the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Florida International University, Texas Southern University and the University of Louisville will be encouraged to participate in the program.

"Many students are seeing health inequities play out in real time as their families have been greatly impacted by COVID-19,” ACHA CEO Devin Jopp, EdD, said in a press release. “Participation in the All of Us program is its own form of health activism, and we think students are ready to take on that challenge.”

In Indiana, Purdue University has launched a study to determine whether a smartwatch and wearable mHealth sensors can accurately detect early signs of COVID-19.

The study will focus on 100 volunteers, each wearing a Samsung Galaxy smartwatch with an app developed by physIQ, a Chicago-based digital health company spun out of the university. They’ll also be wearing an adhesive chest sensor developed by physIQ that collects a single-lead electrocardiogram signal for five continuous days.

“There won’t be a point where a smartwatch can tell you that you’re COVID-19 positive, but it could potentially say, ‘Within the next couple of days, you might be getting sick and should go get tested,’” Craig Goergen, Purdue’s Leslie A. Geddes Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, said in a press release.

“An increased heart rate or respiration rate means something different if it increased while you were resting as opposed to running, but most smartwatches have difficulty distinguishing that, so it is really recovery and resting periods that we are focused on with this approach,” he added.

And in California, the University of California at San Francisco is launching a 10-year study to determine whether an mHealth wearable can help detect early signs of atrial fibrillation.

In the study, UCSF researchers are partnering with VivaLNK to test the company’s wearable ECG sensor on roughly 3,000 volunteers. Each participant will wear the sensor around the clock for one week every month, during which data will be captured through an mHealth app and transmitted to care providers for analysis.

“We hope to identify imaging, serum and digital biomarkers of AF risk and progression in this study,” Jeffrey Olgin, a professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at UCSF and the study’s principal investigator, said in a press release. “The capabilities of the VivaLNK ECG sensor will enable us to capture a larger continuous dataset in order to help achieve our goals.”