Caremap is a collaborative effort between Duke Health Systems and Boston Children’s Hospital to provide a much needed resource to families of children with complex medical needs. Caremap is a patient and family oriented application which allows for the secure storage and sharing of important medical information, often not found or easily accessible to families. Through the latest technology, we have created a secure and novel mobile application leveraging Apple’s CareKit framework to help families track and gain insights into any number of important elements of their children’s lives. In addition to suggested parameters such as bowel habits, nutrition, mood and pain to name a few, one can create custom metrics to track such as school attendance or seizure frequency. Over time, trends will be displayed in colorful graphs that may help elucidate insights previous unseen. We are a team of clinicians and technologists, working with families and patients to create a tool that improves their lives and their care throughout the healthcare system and at home.

Absolutely! Anyone can use Caremap to track their own or their child’s health and data. At the moment, Caremap does not connect to any patient portal or electronic health record but we’re looking forward to adding this feature soon. For now, all data is manually entered and controlled by you.

Of course you can. With Caremap, you are in control of your data. Caremap will allow you to generate a PDF snapshot that can be shared with your trusted network. In the event of an emergency or when away from your trusted medical home, Caremap can be used to give critical information such as allergies, and emergency action plans to medical providers by simply showing them the app or emailing a secure PDF. In addition, this PDF can be shared with other trusted caretakers, from family members to teachers and babysitters who need easy access to this important information.

Caremap is unique in that medical information is stored securely on your iPhone or iOS device only. We have leveraged Apple’s CareKit platform to deliver an incredibly useful and secure experience for our users. As opposed to most apps which store data in the cloud, Caremap stores all the data you input on the device and is controlled by you and you alone. Because of this high level of data security, certain features like having multiple users on a given account is not possible. We think you should have complete control of the medical information entered on Caremap. We recommend that you password protect your phone and use the PIN lock on the Caremap app for extra security.

Caremap was designed to help families of children with complex medical issues, however anyone can use Caremap and will find it useful. What is unique about Caremap is that it is a patient and family-centric application which allows for the secure storage and sharing of important medical information. Working with families and providers from Duke Health System and Boston Children’s Hospital who care for children with complex medical needs, we have provided a safe place to capture information that is important to patients and families and often not found in the medical record. Furthermore, using Apple’s CareKit platform, we can track and provide insight into any metric a user chooses to follow, from school attendance to bowel habits, nutrition, mood and pain as examples. By longitudinally tracking these parameters, insights will become evident through intuitive graphs and trends.

Please contact us at caremap@duke.edu