Cormeum App Celebrates Year of Helping Patients with Heart Failure Manage Condition

A heart failure nurse specialist saw a need for her patients to track the specific metrics needed for their physical well-being, empowering them to take better control over their health. In January, Cormeum ? from the Latin "cor meum" or "my heart" ? began helping patients easily and intelligently track important metrics and relay that information to their providers through a convenient app. The company now celebrates its first year of helping patients battle heart failure by tracking their lifestyle and condition and communicating in an all-new way with their care teams.

"This bridges the gap from patients to providers so they can work together to manage heart failure," said Lesley Hanselman, the app's creator. Hanselman's 15 years of working with patients experiencing heart failure reinforced how important tracking their behaviors, medications and symptoms is to their quality of life in relation to their condition. "This app makes it easier and more likely for patients to stick with their care plans," she said.

Unlike more generalized health tracking apps, the Cormeum app was created with heart-failure patients in mind. No other app collects all of the data needed by healthcare providers in such an easy, convenient manner, empowering patients to track their sodium intake, body weight, fluid intake and output, blood pressure, medications, mood, general symptoms and nutrition, including carbohydrate and sugar intake, as well as overall calories. These aspects of lifestyle are proven important in decades of evidence-based research into the management of heart failure.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 6.2 million adults in the U.S. are living with heart failure, a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart muscle is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body's needs for blood and oxygen. This is a serious condition for which there is usually no cure. Many people with heart failure lead full, enjoyable lives when their condition is managed well with heart failure medications and healthy lifestyle changes, according to the American Heart Association.

Cormeum's ease of use helps patients accurately and intelligently stay involved in their care, and empowers them to work more effectively in partnership with their healthcare providers. The average heart-failure patient is over the age of 60 when they are diagnosed, so Cormeum features large, easy-to-understand icons, readable fonts and twice-daily reminders to enter key metrics. The app allows patients with heart failure and their caregivers to:

• Track daily, weekly or monthly progress in lifestyle and in symptoms
• Receive twice-daily reminders to engage with the app;
• Set reminders for taking medications; and
• See trends and share those with the healthcare team.

"I've discovered that it has improved my relationship with my provider, as it leads to a more detailed discussion of the items tracked in the app," noted Jack, who uses Cormeum to help him manage his condition. "For example, why is the second number of the blood pressure more important depending on the details of your cardiac condition? If the patient is more knowledgeable in the details and interaction of the items tracked by the app, they will take those details seriously and enter more accurate information."

The use of technology can help patients enter more information, in an accurate way: "Why write important information down on paper you can lose when it's so much easier to have an app to keep it all and see trends?" reinforced Hanselman. "Our hope is that Cormeum helps patients with heart failure make their life more convenient. Studies show that if you do self-management well, we can all have a better quality of life."

Cormeum is developed by Gingko Heart, LLC, a member of the American Heart Association's Center for Health Technology and Innovation. The app is available on Apple's app store and Google Play for a one-time fee of $9.95. There is no cost for Cormeum users or providers to share data via a secure access code. More information is available at Cormeumapp.com, where users can also find a blog and more than 30 low-sodium recipes developed by award-winning chef Ken Bergeron.