Asthma is one of the most common respiratory illnesses in the world. It affects over 18 million people in the United States alone, and no less than 6 million of them are children. Although the attacks are often manageable, around 2 million cases end up as emergencies with an average hospital stay of 4 days. Asthma is also responsible for over 3,000 deaths in the country while the average health care cost is more than $3,000 per sufferer.
In order to help patients cope and manage asthma more effectively, Dr. Sam Pejham, who works as a doctor and researcher for medical School Clinical Faculty of University of California-San Francisco as well as a director for Tri-Valley Pediatrics, created an app known as AsthmaMD.
In hindsight, it helps track asthma attacks and triggers. Whenever a person suffers from asthma, he or she can log in the episode complete with details such as date, peak flow, symptoms, triggers, and medications. The patient or the parent may add notes as well as such as how long the sufferer reacted to the medication, or other reactions and symptoms that may not be present in the previous attacks. It also acts as a health journal for the patient. AsthmaMD is customizable. Users can add alerts and reminders, as well as set up the prescribed action plan and medications.
Most of all, the app, which can be downloaded in an iPhone, can be helpful for health care providers as they can get a more accurate or comprehensive information of the patient's asthma condition and history. Users can send reports to their physicians while doctors can monitor the progress via the chart severity feature.
The app also collects data such as location and prevalence of asthma anonymously mainly for research purposes. The doctor hopes that with this app, they can establish a correlation among asthma attacks, triggers, environment, and even climate change.
