A growing proportion of the United States population is over 65 years of age and living longer, with increasing medical care needs. Longevity creates new information and communication needs for families to coordinate the care of their parents. Increasingly, families find it challenging to coordinate care for their frail older family members and support their medication management. This presentation will report on the findings of InfoSAGE, an online private social network with tools for communication and care coordination for elders and their families. The aims of InfoSAGE are: 1) To establish the feasibility of the use of an online platform by elders, families, and their caregivers for information exchange and care coordination; 2) To understand communication patterns between elders and their online care network; 3) To understand the usability challenges involved in medication management using mobile apps. We will describe the design and usage of InfoSAGE by family networks. We will discuss strategies for using mobile apps to collect patient-reported outcomes and increase underrepresented populations in clinical trials. The challenges to rapidly deploying a mobile app that can be accessible and usable by people at all levels of literacy for public health needs during pandemics will be discussed.

Yuri Quintana, Ph.D., is a global leader in developing and evaluating digital health systems. He is Chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics at Beth Israel Lahey Health and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University. His research is focused on learning networks and clinical care collaboration platforms that empower patients, families, and health professionals. He is leading the development of InfoSAGE, a mobile app for home-based coordination (https://infosagehealth.org)  for medication and symptom management. He created Alicanto Cloud (https://www.alicantocloud.com) an online platform for learning and collaboration used by health professionals at Harvard-affiliated hospitals such as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Cancer to disseminate the best healthcare practices and virtual consultations. Alicanto is used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s JWEL Center for sharing best practices in education. As a Senior Scientist at Homewood Research Institute in Canada, he has developed new methods to evaluate digital mental health systems using evidence-based approaches. Previously, at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, he developed Cure4Kids, a global pediatric cancer learning network used by thousands of health professionals, POND4Kids, an international cancer registry, and Cure4Kids for Kids, a mobile app promoting healthy lifestyles for children. Quintana was a principal investigator in the Canadian HealNet Research Network. He has held high-tech positions at IBM and Watcom. Quintana obtained his engineering degrees from the University of Waterloo in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Engineering. More at http://www.yuriquintana.com and on Twitter at @yuriquintana. Contact: Email: yquintan@bidmc.harvard.edu 

In recent years, digital health has been advancing at a fast pace in Brazil. In 2017, the “Digital Health Strategy for Brazil” was approved by the Federal Government, with telehealth as one of the areas of activity. Although telehealth has been widely used in Brazil since the early 2000s, the Covid-19 pandemic has consolidated its practices in the country. The expansion of connectivity and digital services in patient care led to the biggest transformation ever seen in the Unified Health System (SUS), considered the largest public system in the world. The UFPE Telehealth Center was created in 2003, and since then has researched and implemented solutions for teaching digital health and patient care. We will provide a current overview of Digital Health in Brazil and address the strategies adopted by NUTES in the fight against Covid-19 through its Clinical Telemonitoring Center (CTC).

Full Professor of Medical Informatics and Coordinator of the Telehealth Center (NUTES)

Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

 

She is Coordinator of the Telehealth Center of UFPE. Former vice president of Brazilian Society of Health Informatics (SBIS), Member of the Digital Health Group at the National Education and Research Network (RNP), Brazilian Association of Telemedicine and Telehealth (ABTms), and IMIA Group of Telehealth and Fellow of the IAHSI - International Academy of Health Science Informatics (IMIA - International Medical Informatics Association).

She has been working in medical informatics for 30 years, having started his career in bioinformatics. With more than 300 publications in journals and conferences, her publications directly addressed health informatics and telemedicine applied in several specialties, focus on public health and primary care, as the principal investigator or co-investigator in all these studies. Pioneer in the incorporation of medical informatics into undergraduate and graduate curriculum in the northeast region of Brazil, it has contributed to the training of thousands of professionals through projects and research supported by federal agencies, such as the Ministry of Health. Founder and coordinates until today the first telehealth center created in a teaching hospital in Brazil, which works with R&D and as a provider of telehealth services to the public healthcare sector in Brazil. Contributed to the formulation of public policies, among them the strategy of the federal government of digital health for Brazil, the University Network of Telemedicine (RUTE) and the Telehealth Brazil Program.

As a researcher at the Telehealth Center and at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Developmental Childhood and Adolescence (INPD), she developed projects in partnership with American and European Universities, with publications and presentations at international events. Following her participation as a member of the IMIA Working Group on Telehealth has contributed to the dissemination of knowledge in the area worldwide. Recently IMIA WG on Telehealth published the book Fundamentals of Telemedicine and Telehealth, of which she was co-editor and author of chapters

Contact: magdala.novaes@nutes.ufpe.br

Brian E. Dixon, PhD, MPA, FACMI, FHIMSS, Contact: bedixon@regenstrief.org

Professor Epidemiology and Global Health

Interim Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics, Regenstrief Institute

Director of Public Health Informatics, Regenstrief Institute

Health Research Scientist, Center for Health Information and Communication, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Service, Roudebush VA Medical Center

Adjunct Professor in Health Informatics, Department of BioHealth Informatics, Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing

Faculty Fellow, Center for Health Policy, FSPH