Start-up makes it easier to track vital data

HAMILTON, Ont. – Is your tetanus shot still up to date? Are you confident all your records are available to your current physician? How do you keep track of medical diagnoses, test results and prescriptions? The answer to all your medical questions will soon be a screen scroll away.

Mohawk College’s newest applied research partnership with a local digital health start-up will make a difference to the thousands of Canadians who are tired of having their healthcare records stored in multiple places.

Mohawk College’s mHealth and eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC) has partnered with Waterloo-based TAMVOES, creator of a health management platform that allows individuals to collect and securely store copies of their health information, such as surgical history, vaccinations, allergies, medications, laboratory tests and much more.

TAMVOES provides users with both a mobile and web platform that hosts their information in one easy-to-access place. The company also recently announced an Apple Health Integration for its brand new mobile app that will allow users to import data such as heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate into the platform.

“Even the healthiest of people have reams of health information about them captured in various places. Especially when there is illness or injury, it’s key that patients and caregivers make informed decisions based on complete and accurate information,” says co-founder Madison McBay (pictured). “Working with MEDIC will give us access to technical expertise around high-level integration that we wouldn’t otherwise have as a start-up.”

Medical test results are a large piece of the data that Tamvoes users, and all individuals concerned about their health or that of their loved ones, want to access. Currently these can be fractured across multiple laboratories and systems, including government databases, with limited to no access available to individuals.

MEDIC’s digital health software developers have designed a universal integration hub that can be easily extended by Tamvoes to different repositories of data to fetch and securely store health data in a Tamvoes user’s Personal Data Trust. The same hub is also connecting Tamvoes users to other services, such as test analysis and interpretation.

“By working with TAMVOES to optimize its system-to-system communication, we’re ensuring that the future of healthcare will be more patient friendly while allowing healthcare providers to maintain confidentiality,” says Doug Ward, general manager of MEDIC. “We are happy to support TAMVOES with its goal of delivering individuals health information with greater efficiency.”

The project will be supported by funding from Southern Ontario Pharmaceutical and Health Innovation Ecosystem (SOPHIE). SOPHIE is a healthcare innovation initiative established by Innovation Factory and the Synapse Consortium to help high-potential life science companies like TAMVOES scale and generate economic value across southern Ontario.