JIS Orthopedics Surgeon Participated in New Study on the Use of Apple Watch and iPhone in Remote Care Management

JIS Orthopedics surgeon David Crawford, MD, participated in a  one-year study that for the first time evaluated the impact of using the Apple Watch and iPhone as remote care management platforms for knee replacement surgery.

The mymobility platform developed by Zimmer Biomet, a medical device maker based in Warsaw, IN, uses the iPhone and Apple Watch to offer a connected experience between doctor and patient that delivers continuous and patient-reported feedback to facilitate care, outcomes and satisfaction about the patients’ surgery prep and recovery.

“The results were very encouraging,” said Dr. Crawford, a joint replacement specialist and one of the study’s lead investigators. “The study indicated that a remote care regiment using mymobility on an Apple Watch or iPhone can result in comparable patient outcomes and even fewer resources than the traditional care model.”

Dr. Crawford said patients in the study required fewer emergency room visits, which he attributes to, among other factors, the education content on the mymobility platform and the ease of communications between the patient and the physician’s team.

“The patients were engaged in their recovery through access to real-time data that can be used to track their recovery progress and through their ability to communicate through messaging and virtual visits,” Dr. Crawford said. “That helps contribute to lower utilization of healthcare resources, which can result in lower costs.”

The findings of the study, which evaluated 401 patients who underwent total or partial knee replacement, were recently presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons (AAHKS).

“Now that we have the results of the study, the use of the Apple Watch as a remote care platform can be implemented on a larger scale,” Dr. Crawford said.