The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions have updated the asthma app, called Asthma Health, that they created for ResearchKit, Apple's open source platform that helps researchers build medical apps and recruit patients for clinical trials. With the new feature, called Doctor Dashboard, LifeMap will push the app beyond the realm of research and into clinical use.

Asthma Health aims to help patients adhere to their treatment plans and avoid asthma triggers. Patients can use the app to record daytime and nighttime asthma symptoms as well as how they affect the patient’s activities. It also tracks daily usage of controller and rescue inhalers along with asthma triggers: colds, increased physical activity, strong smells, exhaust fumes, house dust, peak flow, and animals. Finally, it tracks emergency department visits, medical visits, and changes in medication. The app will also send updates about when users should take medication and what the air quality is like in a specific location.

Since launching Asthma Health, six months ago, the researchers recruited and enrolled over 8,600 research participants. While the app was launched as a research tool, Yu-Feng Yvonne Chan, director of digital health and personalized medicine at the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai, explained that after using the app, study participants told researchers that the app was also helping them better understand and manage their condition.

“We learned that some app users were showing their historical health data, as displayed in Asthma Health, to their doctors, in order to start very information-rich conversations," Corey Bridges, CEO of LifeMap Solutions, said in a statement. "Inspired by these stories, we worked closely with our Mount Sinai colleagues to build an even more useful feature—the new Doctor Dashboard. Now, the patient just presses a button in the app and hands their iPhone to their provider. Within seconds, any provider can get a sense of the patient’s recent asthma condition, symptom control, and activity. Any patient can show their Doctor Dashboard to any care provider, anywhere.”

In addition to the Doctor Dashboard feature, the researchers are piloting an Epic integration with Mount Sinai's Respiratory Institute as co-investigators, so pulmonologists at Mount Sinai can access patient data from Asthma Health.