Agreement Allows for EHRs to Include Heart, Lung Sounds

For the first time in history, clinicians are able to capture patients' heart and lung sounds and integrate them into the EHR. This milestone represents a groundbreaking advance in longitudinal patient care.

Three companies have joined forces to launch this groundbreaking effort: Direct Urgent Care, Eko, and drchrono. Using a quick three step process, clinicians can now seamlessly incorporate heart and lung sounds into patient health records.

1. Direct Urgent Care, a Berkeley-based urgent care provider with 30,000 patients, enables providers to record important heart and lung sounds using the Eko Core Digital Stethoscope
2. The Eko Core Digital Stethoscope wirelessly transmits stethoscope sounds to a HIPAA-compliant mobile app on a smartphone or tablet. 
3. The information is then uploaded to the drchrono EHR, an online medical platform with comprehensive EHR capabilities, to enable clinicians to seamlessly incorporate heart and lung sounds alongside patient health records.

Direct Urgent Care will be able to streamline cardiology and pulmonology specialist referrals, reference sounds between patient visits and improve long term care for patients of all ages. "Improving patient care is one of the most critical pieces to health care today, and this EHR-integrated stethoscope is a game-changer in the industry," says Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, founder of Direct Urgent Care. "The ability to share recorded heart and lung sounds with specialists who may not be in the same location as the patient dramatically improves the time to diagnosis and treatment of the patient. An EHR-connected stethoscope is truly revolutionary."

Listed by TIME Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Inventions of 2015," the Eko Core is the only FDA-cleared digital stethoscope on the market that amplifies 40X, wirelessly pairs with a HIPAA-compliant mobile application, and enables telemedicine clinics to stream heart and lung sounds to remote clinicians in real-time. "While the stethoscope has been around for two centuries, this represents the first time that doctors are not only hearing heart and lung sounds but also saving them to the patient's record. This is a really decisive moment in digital health care and we are pleased to partner with industry experts to bring this technology forward," says Connor Landgraf, CEO of Eko Devices. "This partnership represents the beginning of better, more integrated and more efficient health care."

The timing of the partnership pairs with drchrono's massive growth, having added more than 90,000 physicians and 6 million patients to the drchrono platform."This is a partnership designed to create the mobile medical toolkit of the future," says Daniel Kivatinos, COO and cofounder of drchrono. "Like the Direct Urgent Care team, doctors of the future will be mobile, carrying a digital stethoscope and iPad or iPhone. The stethoscope, iPad and iPhone should be connected."

To learn more about the integrated solution, visit www.ekodevices.com/drchrono and www.drchrono.com/ehr-digital-stethoscope.

Source: drchrono