After Cerner made a recent investment in Seattle-based startup Xealth, the two companies rolled out new capabilities to make digital health tools easier to deploy. One of Cerner’s clients, Phoenix-based Banner Health, is rolling it out to help its physicians prescribe and monitor digital health tools.
Most digital health recommendations still involve handing patients brochures or asking them to download something from an app store, Xealth CEO Mike McSherry wrote in an email.
“Without Xealth, clinicians would recommend a tool and the rest was up to the patient,” McSherry wrote. “Some apps do have a clinician view offering some metrics, although most do not tie into prescribing data and are in stand-alone dashboards, requiring the clinician to actively seek out data as well as remember various different passwords to different systems and portals.”
Xealth works with more than 30 different digital health solutions, from platforms for managing chronic conditions like Omada, to virtual behavioral health provider SilverCloud.
It integrates directly into electronic health record systems, allowing physicians to place and send orders for digital programs directly to patients’ smartphones. Within the EHR, they can monitor patients’ responses in a dashboard, which can be filtered to present the most relevant information to care teams.
Xealth is already integrated with Cerner’s biggest competitor, Epic, making its platform available to more than half of U.S. hospitals.
“We are open to integrating with more EHRs as customer demand warrants,” McSherry wrote.
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