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Sharecare Launches New Version of AskMD for iOS 8

AskMD

Integration with Apple’s HealthKit Provides Users a More Comprehensive Way to Manage Their Health

This player is used in Sharecare’s Q&A template.

01_IdentifyATLANTA, October 1, 2014 – Sharecare, the online health and wellness engagement platform founded by Dr. Mehmet Oz and WebMD founder Jeff Arnold, today announced the launch of AskMD for iOS 8, including integration with Apple’s HealthKit to empower consumers to take a more proactive role in managing their health. An award-winning, free, iOS-exclusive app, AskMD helps you collect information about your symptoms, learn more about common causes, and immediately connect you to the doctors and specialists qualified to treat them.

“Since AskMD’s launch, hundreds of thousands of people have used our comprehensive clinical decision support tool to make better healthcare decisions. Now, with the Health app’s faster, more accurate on-boarding, AskMD will get you access to care more quickly without compromising quality,” said Jeff Arnold, chairman and CEO of Sharecare. “Additionally, with AskMD’s ability to recognize patterns and identify possible pandemics, we have the potential to advance episodic medicine, helping individual consumers as well as larger populations stay healthy, not just get better once they’re sick.”

AskMD helps you get organized around your health, enabling you to have a more productive doctor’s visit and ultimately get better. In iOS 8, AskMD taps into HealthKit, with your permission, to access your current health data, including age, biological sex, height, weight and blood pressure; and populate your health vitals in AskMD’s Health Check, providing an animated snapshot of your personal health.

Additionally, the new version of AskMD includes:

  • Access to exclusive Health Tip videos from Dr. Oz that provide preventative and follow-up guidance, based on your consultations;
  • Ability to upload a photo or video to the For Your Visit consultation notes to share with your doctor;
  • Enhancements to friends and family profiles to help you better manage their health; and
  • Periodic delivery of “smart” push notifications to help improve your overall health and wellness.

“Today is an important one for consumers and healthcare providers, alike, and I’m personally excited that AskMD’s new features – like Health Tip videos from me – will enable us to provide both preventative and follow–up care to our users based on the consultations they take,” said Dr. Oz. “The combined power of AskMD for iOS 8 with HealthKit integration gets me one step closer to realizing my goal of helping as many people as possible – beyond my patients and viewers of The Dr. Oz Show – to live their healthiest lives.”

AskMD guides users through a personalized pre-encounter questionnaire that delivers just-in-time evidence-based decision support, taking into account all their symptoms and other factors, like medications and known conditions, and matches their answers against the latest clinical research, providing users with results that actually are relevant to them. After a user completes the questionnaire, AskMD arms them with a summary of their results and relevant details that they can share with their physician. The questionnaires and guidance in AskMD are regularly peer-reviewed, and based on the same sources and data that most physicians use for directing care, including major textbooks, case reports, evidence-based reviews and systematic guidelines.

The AskMD App, initially launched in December 2013 in partnership with Hospital Corporation of America, is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch, or at www.AppStore.com/AskMD. You also can access AskMD on the web at www.sharecare.com/askmd.

About Sharecare

Sharecare is a health and wellness engagement platform that provides people with personalized resources to help them live their healthiest lives. Nearly 40 million people have shared more than 5 billion data points about their health status and habits with Sharecare, which uses that information to create a comprehensive health profile allowing users to access all of their health resources in one place and dynamically connect to the knowledge, evidence-based programs and health professionals they need. Created by Jeff Arnold and Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2010, Sharecare’s predictive and personalized platform is accessed daily by millions of consumers, including viewers of The Dr. Oz Show, patient populations of the country’s leading hospital systems and every Soldier in the United States Army.

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