Latest mHealth Partnership Launches a Digital Link to the EHR

California-based Direct Urgent Care is utilizing digital stethoscope to integrate mHealth data straightly into the medical record.

A California-based chain of urgent care clinics is integrating information from a digital stethoscope into its electronic health record, giving clinicians instant access to heart and lung sounds.

Direct Urgent Care, serving few 30,000 consumers in Berkeley, Mountain View and Oakland and soon expanding to San Francisco, is using the Eko Core Digital Stethoscope, which transmits data through a mobile app directly into the company’s drchrono EHR.

Caesar Djavaherian, MD, MS, FACEP, Direct Urgent Care’s founder, claims the typical stethoscope is a subjective device, depending on the doctor to listen to and analyze heart and lung sounds. With a digital stethoscope sending those sounds into the EHR, “you can very easily share that with a cardiologist … or a pulmonologist wherever they are.”

Whenever a sufferer is referred to a specialist, “the first thing they are going to want to do is re-evaluate the doctor’s concerns,” Djavaherian states. “They are going to want to listen to those sounds.” That might mean a delay of weeks or even months to schedule an appointment with a specialist.