Bluejay Mobile Health Working to Improve Outcomes for Patients

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

New Hacienda Tenant Using Smart Phone Technology to Improve Rehabilitation

Using smart phone and tablet technology to improve outcomes for patients who require physical therapy is the goal of BlueJay Mobile Health, a new Hacienda tenant which has moved into the Rosewood Commons complex at 4460 Rosewood Drive.

"The mission for the company is to build a mobile platform for doctors and physical therapists to engage patients," says Dongxiao (Tony) Zhang, president and CEO. "Currently, the patient comes to see the doctor or to do the therapy, they get a treatment, and they're on their own. They've got a piece of paper that tells them what exercise they should do while they're away, but there's no personalized instruction to them. There's no way to track whether the patient is actually doing the right exercises or how they recover from their rehabilitation. That's the gap that we see the technology may bridge, so we built a platform."

BlueJay Mobile Health offers doctors and therapists a mobile app or web site that can be used to send customized videos of exercises to patients' cell phones which the patients can use as guides.

"On top of that," adds Zhang, "they can record results, how well they rehabbed, what's the pain level, their physical functions, and so on. So the therapist and the patient can communicate in real time."

The company is currently conducting pilot studies with a variety of institutions, including Stanford, to further improve the software. "Eventually we would like to promote the technology to many health institutes so they can engage patients during the course of their rehabilitation - especially discharged patients who are away from the hospitals and clinics." All communication and medical data takes place in a secure, HIPAA-compliant environment.

Over the course of the platform's development, the company has engaged a variety of experts. "When we talk about rehabilitation it includes many areas, like orthopedics where you break a bone or have some injury, sports medicine, and those type of recoveries," says Zhang. "It also includes other areas like neural rehab for people recovering from a stroke as well as children with brain damage, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, or speech therapy - all of these are in the neural area. There is also geriatric specific rehab. For chronic disease management, like certain cancer patients, they need to do certain exercises to alleviate their pain, and their surgery-associated issues.

"We have engaged experts in each of these areas to help us develop content. We have a library of many thousands of videos for each of these conditions, and the doctor and therapist can easily grab these videos and combine them and send them to the patient. It's like a prescription - we are the first company to do prescriptions of home exercises."

Even with such an extensive video library, BlueJay Mobile Health is focused on expansion. "We have a small studio right here in Rosewood Commons and have a professional team to film and produce this content. These will be used in our platform to benefit the therapist and the patient so they can communicate more easily."

For additional information on BlueJay Mobile Health, access the company's web site at www.bluejayhealth.com.

Photo: Staff of Bluejay Mobile Health

Also in this issue...