Yale School of Medicine unveils Hugo cloud-based personal health record
In their quest to engage more patients in research, the Yale School of Medicine created Hugo.
Yale researchers describe Hugo as a highly secure cloud-based personal health platform that enables people to access their electronic health records from multiple healthcare systems and synchronize those records with a research database. The service also allows people to contribute information from wearable devices and questionnaires.
Yale Professor of Medicine Harlan Krumholz, MD, who helped develop Hugo, is leading the first research study with Allen Hsiao, MD, associate professor of pediatrics and of emergency medicine and chief medical information office for Yale School of Medicine and Yale New Haven Health System.
The study will examine hospital readmission and emergency department use after hospital discharge. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of patients who need to be readmitted to the hospital are admitted to a different facility. As they see it, this presents challenges when studying readmission rates and risk factors because researchers must manually track and collect this information.
With Hugo, patients can authorize researchers to use their data, which can be pulled from disparate EHR systems. The data will be synchronized and organized so that it is suitable for research.
Krumholz, who is also director of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale-New Haven Hospital, said Hugo could be a game changer. Jerome P. Kassirer, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, agreed.
“By leveraging digital data with a technology that puts people in a position to easily and securely acquire and share their data, the Hugo technology holds great promise to accelerate our progress toward next generation breakthroughs,” Kassirer said in a statement.
Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com
