Pro-Change was recently awarded a grant from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to transform its existing digital Tobacco Cessation solution into a HealthKit-enabled app integrated into electronic health records (EHR). The app will leverage Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standards to:

  1. Implement a full range of best practices in tailored health behavior change nudges;
  2. Deliver hyper-personalized behavior change guidance based on Apple’s HealthKit data regarding medical history and conditions; and
  3. Automatically provide key actionable insights to the EHR with micro-messages clinicians can deliver to accelerate a patient’s behavior change progress.

The interoperability of this digital therapeutic for tobacco cessation will provide value to both patients and clinicians; empower and support lasting behavior change; and enable the implementation and evaluation of a best-in-class approach to tobacco treatment by removing barriers to accessing data-driven insights at the point of care. This is especially important as tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., contributing to more than 480,000 premature deaths annually.

Like Pro-Change’s existing evidence-based, mobile-optimized Tobacco Cessation solution, the app will address combustible cigarette smoking, smokeless tobacco, and electronic nicotine delivery systems (e-cigarettes or vapes).

“This app will facilitate the successful implementation of digital, tailored tobacco cessation interventions in clinical settings,” said Dr. Sara S. Johnson, Co-President and CEO of Pro-Change and the study’s principal investigator. “Given the extensive end-user input we will obtain, this research could also provide critical insights to inform care models using patient-generated health data for other health behavior apps. We’re looking forward to leveraging interoperability standards to provide critical lifestyle medicine insights to clinicians in a readily accessible format.”

This research is supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43HL156588. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.