Boston Children’s Hospital and school-based healthcare platform CareDox are teaming up to provide new digital care management services to K-12 schools, the organizations exclusively revealed to MobiHealthNews this morning. 

Caredox specializes in working with schools and capturing students’ medical charts and medication, creates data and immunization analytics and gives parents and providers alerts about health events. While the partnership is still in its early days, the idea is to digitize protocols and decision support tools developed by Boston Children’s for staff in the schools.

“From our perspective, if we think about the broad care of a patient, we have a lot of gaps in ways we can connect with patients and address care and adherence to protocol,” Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s, told MobiHealthNews. “There is only so much that traditional healthcare can do to provide that continuous care, so the more we can arm the broad set of players to have the same kind of information and protocols and the ability to keep everyone on the same page, we think the better for the patient at the end of the day.”

Early intervention is key when treating many conditions, said Browntein, but often times kids will only be screened for certain conditions by the specialist themselves. One of the first focus areas of this program will be mental health. The partners will work with clinicians from Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Psychiatry to develop screening methods for children with ADHD, depression, PTSD and other mental health conditions.

“We have all of this amazing content and know-how and it is used here, but if we digitize and make it more available we could extend the reach of the hospital,” Brownstein said. “We have been very excited about CareDox for a while now because they are addressing this unmet need of care in the school environment, where so much of the interaction takes place. There is this idea of bringing care to where people are as part of care delivery.”

While the tools have not yet been launched, the hospital is looking at the Massachusetts area as a starting place for deployment. 

Why it matters 

The partners estimate that children spend 14 percent of their waking hours in school by the time the are 18 years old. Brownstein said that digitizing protocols and support tools could help accelerate the mission of meeting patients where they are and provide early screening for children in need of help to get the right care. 

The trend 

Boston Children’s Hospital has been heavily invested in the digital health space for some time. It has inked deals with emerging names in the field including Buoy Health and GetWellNetwork. 

The organization has also been integrating Amazon’s Alexa. In early 2016, Boston Children’s Hospital was among the first healthcare organizations to leverage Amazon Alexa with KidsMD, a skill that helps parents understand their child’s symptoms, seek basic medication dosing guidance, or decide whether an in-person visit is necessary. 

New York-based CareDox has been making its way onto the digital health stage in recent years. In January of 2018 the company landed $16 million in series B funding co-led by AI Life Sciences Investments LLC and 7wire Ventures.