SPINN is for you and your family!

Hi, Welcome to the Families page of the SPINNphr web site.

On this page, we’ll tell you why we think you’ll like SPINN, the Secure Personal Information & Notification Network and why you’ll want your doctors and hospitals to communicate your most important personal health information through SPINN—The Secure Personal Health Information & Notification Network.

Many of us live with chronic illness or medical conditions. In fact, about 25 percent of us live with some form of chronic medical condition – diabetes, high blood pressure, congestive heart failure or Alzheimer's disease, to name just a few. And for every person living with chronic medical conditions, there is at least one more family member, friend or guardian who is almost as deeply involved in managing that chronic illness. We all know the scenarios:

• Older parents live a few hours away, each facing increasing health challenges.  A son or daughter struggles to keep them at home, where they want to be, as long as possible while managing his or her own life responsibilities. “How long can they live independently? What can I do to help them from here?”
• A pregnant woman struggles to manage gestational diabetes. She’s been through it before. “It only acts up when I’m pregnant, but it’s just too important.”
• A businessman is recently diagnosed with a heart condition that requires careful management of medications, exercise and diet to ensure that his blood is neither too thick nor too thin. “How can I juggle all of this without disrupting the rest of my life?”
• A son worries as his mother shows increasing signs of forgetfulness and confusion. Should she be alone? Will the police come again? Will Emergency Medical Services think this is a new health crisis that needs immediate and costly evaluation and testing, or will they understand that this is just how things are now? But most of all, in an emergency, “will I know in time?”

• Reduce your healthcare costs by avoiding duplicate tests and providing easy yet secure access to billing and insurance information.
• Have peace of mind, knowing that you will not be alone in an emergency because SPINN’s automatic notification feature lets your loved ones know when you are receiving medical attention.

• Test results can be loaded directly from the lab—you don’t need to type in all that information yourself.
• Readings from home health monitoring devices, like glucose monitors, blood pressure monitors, weight scales and other devices can be automatically uploaded to HealthVault, where SPINN gives you the tools to use that information.
• Set triggers to warn you when important medical things need your attention.
• Monitor the health of your loved ones by making sure their test results are normal, they are taking their medications, and making their doctor appointments.

Why SPINN?

• Some people, often older people, may not want anything to do with computers at all. In some cases, they might accept only a pill box. So we’ve found a handy pill box that knows when you have opened a bin to take your medicine. It reminds you when to take your medication and it hooks up to the telephone line so the information can be available to SPINN automatically—with no extra work for you.
• Younger people often prefer to communicate through their cell phone. SPINN allows you to do most things through any web-enabled cell phone.
• And you may want to see a dashboard with recent events and a calendar to help you quickly see the most important information across all of your family.

By early 20008, it was clear that interest in Personal Health Records was growing. We went live with the first free version of SPINN, connected to Microsoft HealthVault, in August, 2008. Now we are introducing our next major release of SPINN. Click here to learn more about our latest pilot.