ICmed updates app to help more families track their medical info

After watching his wife grapple with keeping a complete and accurate family medical history, Anil Kshepakaran and his team built the company and app ICmed to help organize and better utilize medical records.
Now after winning over Kshepakaran’s wife and 5,000 other users, the ICmed team has released the second generation of its app, which they say will help you better take care of your family.
“Most healthcare apps out there are for you the individual to manage your own health, like a Fitbit, but the record of those things isn’t great,” said Michael McShea, ICmed’s chief strategy officer. “We’re taking a different approach, we’re saying it’s not your health, it’s about the health of the people you love.”
McShea sees the product as a way for young parents to help manage the records of their children or for adult children to keep track of what is going on with elderly parents or their siblings who may have medical issues.
To help families fill the app with their information McShea says the ICmed team added a social component.
“The way that health is managed in the family is a collaborative effort. That collaboration is important. The social network actually reinforces good behavior,” he said, adding that someone is much more likely to change or modify a behavior (like quitting smoking) if they make a public commitment. He said using ICmed as a family is making a commitment.
For Kshepakaran, the company’s CEO, his family tried to keep up with medical history in long documents but didn’t find them useful. He said trying to keep information that way made it hard to comprehend and wasn’t there when needed.
“Every time you go to the doctor, they start asking questions and you may not know,” he said.
Dr. Greg Pelton, CMO at ICmed, said that critical medical history is often at a loss when people need it most — during a medical emergency.
“When you visit the emergency room or a new specialist with your child or elderly parent, it is more important than ever that you have their essential medical information, like medications,” Pelton said. “The doctor making decisions about your loved one’s care will often not have access to this crucial information when they are deciding on treatment.”
Pelton said that using ICmed will allow parents to feel more comfortable when their children are in the care of others because their medical information can be immediately available.
“Medical mistakes are still the third leading cause of death behind cancer and heart disease,” McShea said. “It’s alarming to think that your medical data is spread across many different systems and there’s no practical way to get it all together.”
The ICmed team is expected to release an Android version of the app later this summer.