A New Meaning for Connected Health at 2016 Symposium (Part 4 of 4)

The previous section of this article continued our exploration of the integration of health care into daily life. This section wraps up the article with related insights, including some thoughts about the future.

Memorable moments
I had the chance to meet with Casper de Clercq, who has set up a venture capital plan devoted to health as a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. He recommends that manufacturers and clinicians give patients a device that collects data while doing something else they find useful, so that they are motivated to keep wearing it. As an example, he cited the Beddit sleep tracker, which works through sensors embedded (no pun intended) in the user’s bed.

He has found that successful companies pursue gradual, incremental steps toward automated programs. It is important to start with a manual process that works (such as phoning or texting patients from the provider), then move to semi-automation and finally, if feasible, full automation. The product must also be field-tested; one cannot depend on a pilot. This advice matches what Glen Tullman, CEO of Livongo Health, said in his keynote: instead of doing a pilot, try something out in the field and change quickly if it doesn’t work.

Despite his call for gradual change, de Clercq advises that companies show an ROI within one year–otherwise, the field of health care may have evolved and the solution may be irrelevant.

He also recommends a human component in any health program. The chief barrier to success is getting the individual to go along with both the initial activation and continuing motivation. Gamification, behavioral economics, and social connections can all enhance this participation.

A dazzling keynote on videogames for health was delivered by Adam Gazzaley, who runs Neuroscience labs at the University of California at San Francisco. He pointed out that conventional treatments get feedback on patient reactions far too slowly–sometimes months after the reaction has occurred. In the field of mental health, His goal is to supplement (not replace) medications with videogames, and to provide instant feedback to game players and their treatment staff alike. Videogames not only provide a closed-loop system (meaning that feedback is instantaneous), but also engage patients by being fun and offering real-time rewards. Attention spans, anxiety, and memory are among the issues he expects games to improve. Education and wellness are also on his game plan. This is certainly one talk where I did not multitask (which is correlated with reduced performance)!

A future, hopefully bigger symposium
The Connected Health symposium has always been a production of the Boston Partners Health Care conglomerate, a part of their Connected Health division. The leader of the division, Dr. Joseph Kvedar, introduced the symposium by expressing satisfaction that so many companies and organizations are taking various steps to make connected health a reality, then labeled three areas where leadership is still required:

  • Reassuring patients that the technologies and practices work for them. Most people will be willing to adopt these practices when urged by their doctors. But their privacy must be protected. This requires low-cost solutions to the well-known security problems in EHRs and devices–the latter being part of the Internet of Things, whose vulnerability was exposed by the recent attack on Dyn and other major Internet sites.

  • Relieving the pressures on clinicians. Kvedar reported that 45 percent of providers would like to adopt connected health practices, but only 12 percent do so. One of the major concerns holding them back is the possibility of data overload, along with liability for some indicator of ill health that they miss in the flood of updates. Partners Connected Health will soon launch a provider adoption initiative that deals with their concerns.

  • Scaling. Pilot projects in connected health invest a lot of researcher time and offers a lot of incentives to develop engagement among their subjects. Because engagement is the whole goal of connected health, the pilot may succeed but prove hard to turn into a widespread practice. Another barrier to scaling is consumers’ lack of tolerance for the smallest glitches or barriers to adoption. Providers, also, insist that new practices fit their established workflows.

Dr. Kvedar announced at this symposium that they would be doing future symposia in conjunction with the Personal Connected Health Alliance (Formerly the mHealth Summit owned by HIMSS), a collaboration that makes sense. Large as Partners Health Care is, the symposium reaches much farther into the health care industry. The collaboration should bring more resources and more attendees, establishing the ideals of connected health as a national and even international movement.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

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