Blog

A new article, Innovations thérapeutiques dans l’asthme, published in the journal Revue des Maladies Respiratoires Actualités, summarizes recent advances in pharmaceutical therapy for asthma and highlights Asthmapolis as a promising approach to improving asthma control. The article was written by Camille Taillé, a pulmonologist from the Hôpital Bichat-Claude Bernard in Paris, and colleague F-X Blanc.

The team from HealthMap has just published a great new article in PLoS Medicine called Participatory Epidemiology: Use of Mobile Phones for Community-Based Health Reporting.

The article describes a number of systems that have been developed to enable distributed health monitoring and information sharing for public health, ranging from well-known platforms like Ushahidi to fellow NASA LAUNCH:Health project FrontlineSMS:Medic.

The team also presents preliminary results from their study of their Outbreaks Near Me smartphone application, which has been downloaded over 110,000 times, and collected over 2,400 submissions from users around the world.

Altogether the article is a valuable appraisal of the strengths and limitations of these systems and the possibilities that crowdsourced information has to complement and strengthen existing public health surveillance and improve population health.

The short video interviews with the LAUNCH: Health teams are now posted on the LAUNCH site. These were filmed during the recent LAUNCH forum and offer great overviews of each of the projects. Thanks again to the LAUNCH team and everyone with NASA, NIKE, US AID and US Dept of State for their support.

Asthmapolis from SecondMuse on Vimeo.

Journalist Gary Wolf provides a quick overview of some the objectives, potential and tools (including Asthmapolis) underlying the Quantified Self movement at TED@Cannes.

Asthmapolis was recently selected to participate in NASA: LAUNCH Health – a forum designed to accelerate solutions to urgent health and health care challenges. We’ll write more about the forum, held Oct 30-Nov 1, here soon. In the meantime, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has highlighted Asthmapolis and the LAUNCH Forum in a new article from their Human Capital program.

We got word yesterday that we won the Twilio developer contest for our integration of Twilio’s SMS API in the Asthmapolis platform! Exciting news since the prize is a lunch meeting with Union Square Ventures. A great opportunity for us to share our story and learn from one of the best VC firms in the world.

The SMS integration is a great extension for our platform because it enables a whole new segment of mobile users to track and share their condition as we continue to develop and roll out the inhaler device.

The new interface is not open to the public, but if you’re interested in using it please send us an email.

We’re big fans of Twilio so one of the ways we’re going to celebrate is to host a Twilio meetup. There are a lot of exciting projects happening in Madison that are using the Twilio API so it’s time we got together to share notes and teach anyone interested in learning more. We’ve created a Meetup group so please let us know that you’re interested and we will circle back when we have the details nailed down.

This week we’ll be back in Washington, DC attending and exhibiting at the West Wireless Health Institute’s (WWHI) first Health Care Innovation Day on October 12th. The objective of this event is to highlight and accelerate the availability of low cost health care solutions by bringing industry and government together.

The events get started early tomorrow. WWHI has lined up a great collection of speakers, including their own Don Casey (WWHI CEO), Aneesh Chopra (US CTO) and Todd Park (HHS CTO). The event will also highlight the VA’s efforts to encourage innovation through its VAi2 initiative, and includes some great panels during the day, including one with Farzad Mostashari and Carol Diamond. See the full agenda for more details.

We’ll be there, along with a number of other companies, doing live demonstrations in the afternoon and will post photos and updates as the day goes along.

Asthmapolis is featured in the August 18, 2010 issue of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Innovations Exchange.

The Innovation Profile, Weekly Feedback to Patients on Use of Rescue Medications Leads to Better Asthma Control, describes the development and results from the pilot project we launched with the support of CDC in 2009.

The Innovations Exchange is a comprehensive program designed to increase the development and adoption of innovations in health care delivery.  It contains more than 475 searchable Innovation Profiles, 1,500 searchable QualityTools, and numerous resources to support the Agency’s mission – to improve the safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity of care – with a particular emphasis on reducing disparities in health care and health among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups.

On June 2 we took part in the Community Health Data (CHDI) forum at the IOM in DC. CHDI is an exciting effort to put HHS data to use to raise awareness of community health and healthcare, and to stimulate development of applications that let individuals and communities explore, investigate, and make informed choices about their health.

Asthmapolis was one of a handful of applications – together with offerings from Microsoft, Google, MeYou Health, and others – showcased at the plenary session. (Video of the event is archived here.) A subsequent Expo session included inspiring new work by a number of groups including MedWatcher, an application from John Brownstein and the Computational Epidemiology Group at Harvard University, and the Univ of Wisconsin / RWJF CountyHealthRankings project.

Todd Park (HHS CTO) and Aman Bhandari (Policy Analyst for the CTO) have written a great summary of the forum and CHDI overall in a post, Harnessing the Power of Information to Improve Health, on the White House blog.