Author: Sam Shi

 
Peach Health aims to address the lack of accessibility in health data management, especially for parents as caregivers. Today, health data is often inaccessible for various reasons: some families do not track their own data, some lose access to records by changing doctors due to travel or instability, while others lose physical documents because of moves or accidents. Parents should be able to track and visualize their children’s health and progress in an app that prioritizes privacy, security, and ease of use. By consolidating and organizing patient data, Peach eases healthcare management for families. Peach empowers parents to make more informed decisions about their children’s healthcare, as they will have immediate access and ownership of their data. By using Peach, parents can easily look up relevant immunizations, lab reports, concerns, sleep activity, eating habits, and growth trends that they have documented. This type of engagement will help streamline doctor office visits. Peach will become the source of truth in the patient’s control. The vision of Peach extends beyond parents tracking their children’s health data. Users will be able to keep their Peach profile with them throughout life.
Writers for The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and The New Yorker agree that helping patients manage their own health data is crucial and “the innovation healthcare really needs”. By enabling patients to become creators of their family’s health records, they can become active contributors to maintaining their electronic health records (EHR), improving its accuracy, relevance, and recency.
The demo website and clickable prototype will be used to kickstart Peach into the market. The demo website showcases and markets the app and will be used to gather user feedback as well as potential investor feedback. On the website, users can indicate interest in the app by signing up using the beta app sign up form. The clickable prototype is a demonstration of what the app itself looks like for the specific use case of a parent who has a 15 month old child. This prototype has been and will continue to be used for usability testing and validating Peach’s value proposition.
The core functionality of Peach allows users to easily separate tracking of daily and monthly tasks. For a parent of a 15 month old, daily tasks to track include naps, sleep, nursing, and diaper changes. Monthly, or intermittent, tasks to track include height and weight change, immunizations, important milestones, and concerns. In exploring these core features during usability testing, users outside the target group of parents vocalized the desire to be able to track their own health data using the Peach app, validating the need that an individual’s health data is currently inaccessible or poorly managed.
Peach’s unique value proposition is that the app itself grows and changes with the user. The features are time dependent, meaning the app focuses only on relevant tasks given the user’s current state. Unlike the Baby Tracker app, Peach features are dynamic and change as the child grows. Parents will clearly see which immunizations are relevant for specific ages. Once their child is of age, parents can easily transfer the ownership of their profile, ensuring that no data is lost. Peach is also different from the Apple Health app because the experience is tailored to the user data that is gathered during the onboarding experience. While Apple Health attempts to be an all-in-one solution with step, sleep, health record tracking features and more, Peach offers simplicity and focus.
A hypothesis that I will continue to test is how tracking daily activity will impact people’s willingness and diligence to track healthcare data. The hypothesis is that incorporating daily tracking into the app will gamify the experience, engaging users on a daily basis. This will get users into the habit of quantifying themselves and their family, which in turn will encourage them to track the “less exciting” healthcare items that are important for managing health. With access to data at this level of detail, the ultimate goal for Peach is to utilize machine learning to predict when a patient might need a specific type of treatment. Peach can then become the ultimate health chaperone.