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  Today in health it Verizon's BlueJeans Telehealth Integrates with Apple Health. May not be relevant from where you sit, but I think it's going to be. So stay tuned. I'll give you the so what. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health. IT at channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged. I wanna thank our sponsor for today's series Healthcare. They reached out about this time last year and said we'd love what you're doing and really appreciate your mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. The rest is history, as they say. If you believe in our mission and wanna support the show as well, please shoot me a note at Partner at this week in health.

It. Dot com. All right. Today's story comes from Healthcare IT News, and the story's title is Verizon's BlueJeans. Telehealth integrates with Apple Health, and again, I believe this is relevant for you. I'm gonna give you some excerpts and I'm gonna tell you how I would use this as a CIO. Here's the excerpts.

The Verizon Virtual Care product, BlueJeans Telehealth, announced this past week that it had enabled integrations with the Apple Health App, with the aim of allowing patients to share data with clinicians during telemedicine visits. The integration will allow patients to share data such as heart rate, sleep, and falls with their provider.

Said BlueJeans, chief Innovator and strategist. Krish Ramma Krishnan in a blog post health app, users remain in control of which categories of health app data they choose to share with their provider. During each telehealth appointment and shared data is encrypted in transit and at rest. This is a Healthcare IT News article, so they have Why does it matter?

According to AK Krishnan, the integration is intended to give patients and providers more data and thus improve the overall visit outcome. The update also includes a unique televisit tile, which supports information and document sharing and displays information collected during the visit. They go on later to say, apple Health has ramped up its offerings in the last few years, bolstered by regulations that enabled information sharing.

And by the growing popularity of wearables, for instance, it recently added measurements of walking steadiness to its new iPhone operating system and measurements of respiratory rate to the Apple Watch Sleep app. Its personal health record features, also enabled data sharing, giving patients access to their electronic health records.

For ready access to information. And we know a lot of health systems have signed on to that. I will tell you as a physician, I'll see patients in the ER and a lot of times the question we asks are what kind of medications are you on? So now to have an area where I can look at all of this is very helpful.

Apple Health App itself is a very powerful health wallet. We can stuff all sorts of things in there, goes into the cloud, it's secure, it's accessible by the patient, and now shareable with the clinician, and that's very powerful. Now, I know some clinicians are gonna say too much information back off, but this is one of those situations where it is patient.

And physician mediated, right? It's the physician saying, Hey, can you share this information with me? Or potentially saying, Hey, can you enable your Apple Watch to track this? We are concerned about this with you. Can you use this series of devices or this ecosystem to track these things? So you have the Apple Health Wallet itself.

The other thing is a lot of health systems have signed on to the Apple Health. Ecosystem as well. And they're sharing the electronic health record into that ecosystem. So that becomes another way of passing the information through the patient to another health system. So that's a possibility as well.

And finally, the Apple Watch is probably one of the most powerful all-purpose. Monitors out there. It has a lot of different sensors on it, and for those who have the means to have an Apple watch, it could become a very powerful tool if nothing else. It's a very powerful combination of tools and it's one of those things, if I were to read this as A-C-I-O-I.

I know I'm probably not using Verizon's BlueJeans, but I'm looking at it going, I want to get this on the roadmap of my telehealth provider. I wanna make sure that this is available for my physicians. I see this combination, this ecosystem, as a very powerful set of tools, and once I get it working in the apple.

Health ecosystem. I will want to turn my attention to Android and that user base as well and make that uniformly available to my patient and my clinician community as the CIO. So that is all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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