Asthma is one of the most common chronic disorders in childhood affecting an estimated 7.1 million children under 18 years of age. It is the third leading cause of hospitalizations among children under 15 and the annual direct healthcare cost for asthma is approximately $50.1 billion.
Qualcomm Inc. through their Qualcomm Wireless Reach™ initiative, are working with Rady Children’s Hospital, the primary pediatric health provider serving San Diego’s, Imperial, and Southern Riverside counties.
Qualcomm and Rady are conducting a study to help asthmatic children. The goal is to use 3G mobile monitoring devices and web-based applications linked to a patient’s meter dose inhaler to automatically record the use of medications via a 3G network that will include the date, time, and location of where the asthmatic inhaler is used.
The project features Asthmapolis and Zephyr technologies to help reduce costs and improve outcomes. The goals are to determine whether asthma-related therapy can be personalized based on a patient’s physiology, reduce serious asthmatic attack emergency room visits, and reduce hospitalizations, and associated costs. The plan is to determine if these indicators can be correlated to the patient’s heart rate, respiratory rate and activity in order to develop better individualized therapy.
Fifty patients between the ages of 7 and 17 will be recruited for the study from the Pulmonary and Asthma/Allergy clinics at Rady. Each participating patient and their family will receive a remote monitoring kit plus training.
The kit will include sensors, one BioPatch device to track heart rate, respiratory rate, and activity, and one Life2net Hub. The devices will use Bluetooth technology to wirelessly send patient information to the Hub and then use the 3G network to send the data to the patient’s provider at the hospital.
Another Qualcomm project launched in 2009 now showing results in South Africa was accomplished through the Qualcomm Wireless Reach initiative in collaboration with the Eastern Cape Department of Health (ECDOH), FHI 260, MTN South Africa, and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University School of Clinical Care Sciences.
The Mobile Health Information System provides nurses and doctors in the ECDOH with 3G-enabled, commercially available smartphones and tablets that are pre-loaded with a locally relevant, reliable clinical library system. The information is designed to support the delivery of improved patient care in a region where many doctors and nurses can’t access the internet for pertinent healthcare data.
The system includes digitized medical guidelines, protocols, diagnostic tools, and drug formularies. All of the content can be downloaded from the ECDOH mobile library portal developed by FHI 360 directly to their mobile devices.
The Qualcomm project was launched as a pilot program with 50 participating nurses at the Port Elizabeth Hospital Complex. In 2012, an additional 125 nurses and doctors working in urban and rural primary healthcare facilities in the Eastern Cape were trained in the use and application of smartphones as well as tablets.
The result was that all nurses and more than 80 percent of doctors were able to make an accurate diagnosis, all nurses and more than 92 percent of doctors were helped to prescribe the correct treatment for their patients, and 96 percent of nurses and more than 80 percent of doctors were helped in prescribing the correct medication dosages.
As a result, Qualcomm and FHI 360 have transferred project management and information management responsibilities to the ECDOH. NMMU is also introducing MHIS into its nursing curriculum and MTN South Africa will offer discounted devices and airtime to help expand the base of participating healthcare providers.
For more information, go to www.qualcomm.com/wirelessreach.