To the folks at WebMD, offering consumers an online link to healthcare resources isn't enough. The true path to health and wellness involves a little prodding and poking.
The New York-based provider of health information unveiled an enhanced version of its mobile app at this week's mHealth Summit in Washington D.C., building upon a partnership launched with Qualcomm this past year that allows consumers to shop for, purchase and manage wireless data from a variety of fitness, wellness and medical devices.
The company also announced enhancements to its provider-facing Medscape Mobile app, enabling physicians to securely send information and instructions to their patients through the WebMD app for iPhone or via the WebMD portal on a PC or other mobile device. The new feature is called Patient Instructions.
"WebMD is partnering with innovative companies like Qualcomm and developing new products and services like Patient Instructions to make health information more actionable and accelerate consumer-provider connectivity," said David Schlanger, WebMD's Chief Executive Officer, in a press release. "As consumers and providers assume more financial risk for the provision of care, WebMD believes that facilitating this kind of engagement is essential to producing quality outcomes and reducing the cost of care."
WebMD and Qualcomm Life had announced their partnership at the 2013 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition this past March in New Orleans, integrating the San Diego-based telecom's 2net mobile platform with WebMD's content to enable consumers to upload biometric data and link that to relevant healthcare information.
During an interview with mHealthNews at the mHealth Summit, Bill Pence, WebMD's EVP, chief technology officer and chief information officer, said his company is uniquely positioned to move forward with patient-facing resources, which can then be linked to providers through the Medscape platform. He said a survey of some of WebMD's 625,000 physicians indicated a strong willingness to push information to patients through an app if the patients were interested in receiving that information.
Pence said the Patient Instructions feature has been in beta since September, and was further enhanced when WebMD last month acquired Avado, a developer of cloud-based patient relationship management technologies designed to improve communication between consumers and healthcare providers.
He said Patient Instructions "is kind of a baby step for us," but represents a first step in the move toward giving clinicians an mHealth link to their patients, Through the feature, physicians on the Medscape platform can select from more than 4,200 clinically reviewed patient instructions and provide them to patients through the WebMD app or their browser. In addition, providers can manage lists of patients and save instruction sets for later retrieval.
Pence said WebMD will be moving slowly in enhancing the Medscape platform, being careful not to move beyond what doctors want to do online. "We're very careful," he said. "We want to put physicians in control."
The idea, Pense said, is to allow physicians to prescribe information to patients through the app – and eventually to be able to prescribe apps themselves.
On the patient-facing side, Pence said WebMD will be rolling out its enhanced app and storefront for biometric devices in early 2014, focusing initially on activity monitors, blood-glucose monitors and wireless weight scales.
