King's College Hospital Pilots Apple Watch with Medopad App to Enhance Chemotherapy Patient Adherence and Care

Recently, King's College Hospital in London (King’s College Hospital) to explore the use of Apple Watch in improving medication management and adherence among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. According to Wareable.com, the hospital will be the first physical institution to pilot the eponymous app developed by the digital health company Medopad. In previous discussions on “in the report on the “Wired Magazine 2015 Health Conference”, there have also been cases ofMedopad. VCBeat has followed up with a compiled translation of detailed foreign media reports on this matter. Let’s take a closer look at how Medopad leverages the Apple Watch to assist in patient treatment within specific clinical practices, thereby achieving better therapeutic outcomes.

Last month, when Medopad launched the app, King's College Hospital (King’s College Hospital) Consultant and hematologist Dr. Siamak Arami stated in an interview with The Journal of mHealth, “Cancer treatment is a challenging process. Enhancing patient adherence to complex treatment regimens and simplifying the documentation and reporting of health issues during treatment are of paramount importance. Medopad’s Apple Watch-based chemotherapy app represents an exciting new development in medical technology, which can significantly improve the quality and safety of patient care, ultimately reducing costs and enhancing outcomes for cancer patients.”

This app provides medication reminders to patients via haptic feedback services and shares data directly with physicians through Apple’s HealthKit. The app can automatically share activity data, while patients can also manually submit symptom and temperature records. These features are highly valuable for clinical care, as they enable physicians to respond promptly to adverse drug reactions and adjust prescriptions in a timely manner based on real-time data obtained from the app.

The hospital provides Apple Watches directly to patients, with the current number standing at one or two. As watch distribution expands, the plan is to distribute 100 units or more. Dan Vahdat, Chief Technology Officer of Medopad, told Wareable.com that the cost of the Apple Watch is negligible in chemotherapy treatment.

“After treatment concludes, the Apple Watch can be handed over to the next patient for continued use. This recycling model keeps the cost at approximately £50 (around RMB 480) per patient,” said Vahdat. “During chemotherapy, a single pill can sometimes cost as much as £1,000 (around RMB 9,600) per day, making the cost of using an Apple Watch negligible.”

Medopad and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) plan to deploy this app in other hospitals across the UK and China. Since its founding in 2011, Medopad has raised $2.8 million, with strategic investors including industry giants such as Bayer, Intel, and Vodafone. It was also a member of the 2013 London Healthbox accelerator.

Finally, here is some other news regarding the Apple Watch. Hello Heart is an Apple Watch app designed to track patients’ cardiac health and manage hypertension. This week, the company released some of its early usage data, paying close attention to behavioral differences between users of the Apple Watch app and those using the iPhone app. They found that patients who tracked their blood pressure using the Apple Watch app were 52% more likely to do so than those using the iPhone app, and those who opted to measure blood pressure via daily reminders were 2.5 times more numerous among Apple Watch users. Furthermore, daily retention rates for Apple Watch users were 55% higher than for iPhone users, a trend that persisted into the second week of treatment. Compared with users who relied solely on the iPhone app, Apple Watch users generated over 67% more medical data. These findings clearly demonstrate the positive role of the Apple Watch in improving patient adherence.

Compiled by: Chen Xin Editor: Luo Xiaosou