Interaction between patient and doctor should not stop once the patient leaves the hospital. It is important to continuously monitor and gather details about the patient's health. A variety of companies provide remote patient monitoring solutions. However, most of them are oriented towards people who require care. It is very unlikely that a healthy person would use a 3rd party remote patient monitoring device on a daily basis. There may be privacy concerns and some issues with the device usage. So it looks like a challenging task.
But what if I say that you don’t need to convince patients? There are fitness bracelets and smartwatches that already capture lots of data. All this data could be helpful for doctors to get more insights into a patient's style of life and overall physical activity.

The question is how a patient could provide a doctor with access to her wearables data. The answer is the EHR patient portal. Nowadays patient portals are more than just a read-only representation of the patient's health records from a particular hospital.
It is possible to build an entire patient-centric ecosystem that will interact with patients all the time. It will be gathering information from the patient's wearable devices.

There are lots of popular wearable devices. It is not enough to integrate your solution just with Apple Health and GoogleFit/Fitbit API. There are many others you should take care of. Also, the integration is not about implementing the software. You have to register an app for every vendor, pass security compliance, etc. Obviously, it takes time and as a result, you may lose your focus on your core features. In Beda EMR we would like to focus on end-user features instead of building an endless number of integrations.

So we decided to reuse existing solutions. That is how we met Metriport. Metriport Devices API provides you access to more than 10 wearables vendors and this list continuously grows. We chose the Metriport Devices API and got the integration up and running in just a couple of weeks. Beda EMR demo patient application leverages the cloud version of Metriport Devices API but you can run your own version of Metriport if you need more granular tweaking or adjustment or if you have to build a specific integration with a specific vendor what only you need for whatever reason.

As a result, Beda EMR has a scalable wearables device integration API. The integration logic is covered by Metriport while we are focused on core EMR and Patient Portal features.

The mobile app can synchronize wearable data to the patient portal. If a patient is not willing to share the data, she won't grant permission for the synchronization. But if it is required later on, the patient may grant permission during the appointment and perform synchronization to show some useful insights to the doctor.

Finally, the patient may not want to share this information with any doctor in the hospital. It can be solved via consent management. To get access to patient data a doctor should get direct consent from the patient. Soon I will share a demo video of how this consent feature works in Beda EMR.

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