Managing Your Health Data Anytime, Anywhere with MyHealth

Stanford Health Care believes in empowering patients, and the MyHealth app, developed in-house, allows patients to do just that. We were one of the first large health care networks in the U.S. to have a working app that exchanged data between the Epic patient record system and Apple’s HealthKit platform. Since then, we’ve expanded to include an Android app as well.

With MyHealth, patients can pay their bills online, make appointments, manage prescriptions, see lab results, and conduct video chats with doctors, all from their computer, tablet, or smartphone. They can even upload their vital signs for a virtual checkup.

Enhancing engagement with their physicians through video chat is an area we plan on growing over the next years to allow patients to get some of their care without leaving their homes.

Because patients have always been at the center of everything we do—and always will be—we are adjusting to changes around them and their behavior. Here in Silicon Valley, these changes are happening faster than anywhere else.

Why “MyHeart Counts” Counts

Heart disease and stroke are the world’s top killers. Our global cardiovascular research study was designed to learn more about how to combat these diseases. The MyHeart Counts app assesses daily activity measures of the general population and compares these to measures of cardiovascular health risk factors and fitness using smartphone and wearable technology. How people divide their time among exercise, sedentary behavior, and sleep all affect cardiovascular health, yet to date these have largely gone unmeasured. With the advancement of phone sensors and wearable fitness tracking devices, we can now gather and measure these factors. In fact, use of smartphones by a large segment of the population allows for data collection on an unprecedented scale.

Designed to study physical activity and heart health through smartphones, the MyHeart Counts open enrollment study is one of the largest and fastest recruiting ever for a research trial. It is ongoing, currently with more than 60,000 participants utilizing mobile consent and participation feedback. Stanford University scientists plan to use data gathered from app users to improve ways to prevent and treat heart disease.

Now in version 2.0, we have combined the app with precision medicine to give users a personalized care management plan. We see the next phase in app development combining biometric monitoring with analytics tools and artificial intelligence to move from collecting to coaching. And ultimately, this may encourage health care providers to use wearables to drive care coordination and behavior change.

A “Navigator” to Guide Searches

For members of the Stanford Corporate Partner Program, their employees have access to Stanford Health Navigator services, which complement their existing health and wellness benefits. With exclusive content developed and curated by Stanford experts, the Stanford Health Navigator conducts searches and compiles scientifically based, reliable information and resources to address any health-related questions that partner company employees may have. The Navigator has access to clinical databases not available on the internet and can save people the time and stress of conducting their own searches, while helping to make sure the information sourced is accurate.

The program also offers monthly educational webinars, each with a question-and-answer session, on topics such as stress management and healthy brain aging. The Navigator can even help members find doctors around the world. So, no matter where patients and their families go, Stanford Medicine expertise is always accessible.