Many of us struggle to manage our chronic conditions, between ongoing appointments, day to day life, and coping with the unpredictable symptoms of our conditions. This is where our mobile phones come in handy. Thanks to ever-evolving technology, we can feel empowered and a bit more in control of our overall well-being by tracking, managing, and learning about our ongoing health treatment.

Going with the adage of what gets measured gets improved. There are a few things we can do to make managing our chronic disease(s) easier. The first step is keeping your care team in the loop, the second is following through on your care plan consistently, and the last is to focus on monitoring and potentially improving your treatment plan as needed.

Having a Care Team Can Help

We all utilize the help of others to maintain our health one way or another. The case may also be that you could be taking care of others.

As an example, in the CareClinic health diary app, you can add caregivers phone numbers to quickly save all information in one place for times of need. Additionally, users can enable the sharing of “Progress Reports” which include adherence information and all other modalities to optimize your health. Sometimes a caregiver may not be aware of what you need to take and when, this too can be shared via the “Share Care Plans” functionality.

Sticking to Your Care Plan Can Be Easy

A care plan from your doctor may encompass taking certain medications at a certain time. However, a comprehensive care plan is much more than that. A care plan is your “self care to-do list” which will enable rapid health improvements.

It may include eating healthier, eating at a certain time, tracking and managing your calories or sugar levels. Some other things that can be added to a care plan may include tracking activities, therapies and even setting reminders to check certain measurements and symptoms throughout the day.

A care plan is everything you need to do to maintain good health. Adding these values will reduce cognitive burden and help you remain on track. An app such as the CareClinic app can provide alerts, notifications and warnings based on your care plan, even better.

Monitoring Progress and Adjusting Your Health Accordingly

Patients often wonder if there is a point in maintaining a health diary. It may make sense to use a calendar or reminders to be notified when to take medications, but are there any inherent benefits to recording when medication was taken, or how we felt afterwards in a diary?

The answer as you can imagine by now is an astounding “Yes, there is a point and a need.” By recording this pertinent information in a health diary, you no longer have to guess and see if a certain medication is causing adverse reactions or flare-ups. You’re taking the guesswork out the picture and providing yourself with more clarity.

Apps are now capable of leveraging AI to automatically help you figure out what’s working and what’s not. Even if the app is not able to make these correlations, your care team will appreciate the undertaking and potentially understand your health a bit better. When you provide data in a structured way to professionals, they can better learn and tweak their treatment for you, no matter what condition you are up against.

Tracking Health for a Better You

A health diary enables greater understanding about your own health and helps communicate the information in an objective way to healthcare professionals.

Web based and mobile diaries are a tool that can help you discover new information about yourself and provide for a more in dept history of how your treatment is progressing. In fact, it has been proven that maintaining a health diary can lead to a multitude of benefits (see this study). You can easily get into the habit by starting to track the essentials and then slowly adding more items to your care plan as you start to see patterns emerge.

This post is sponsored by CareClinic. Thoughts and opinions shared were my own.