Tag Archives: mhealth

Why Innovation Requires Letting Go to Drive Change

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This year’s 2nd Annual Digital Health Conference put the spotlight on efforts to advance healthcare innovation in New York and beyond. While the big apple is home to some of today’s biggest name celebrities like Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, talk of progress on health information exchanges and the secure sharing of data, as well as new mHealth and telemedicine tools, was top of mind at the conference.

Featured over the two-day conference were keynotes with Dr. David Brailer, Chairman of Health Evolution Partners, and often referred to as the ‘grandfather of health IT’, and Stephen Dubner, journalist and award-winning author of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics, as well as breakout sessions on some of today’s hottest topics in healthcare.

One of the most well attended and thought provoking sessions was the ‘mHealth Innovators Panel’ with Ben Chodor, CEO of Happtique, as moderator and Leonard Achan, Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at The Mount SInai Medical Center; Wendy Mayer, Vice President, Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer; and Martha Wofford, Vice President, Head of CarePass at Aetna as panelists. By addressing the goals, perspectives and challenges of using mHealth for care delivery, this hour-long panel offered key insights on mHealth’s potential to revolutionize the healthcare ecosystem from the key players in the market including hospital providers, physicians, patients, pharma, payers and programmers.

Q: How do you convince the C-suite that innovation is important?

Wendy: My team drives innovation platforms with a focus on transforming digital to support business and develop capability tools across the organization. With digital, you can innovate more quickly. Pfizer is still working towards a corporate digital strategy but has come a long way.

Q: How has innovation changed?

Martha: There’s been an explosion of applications. Now it’s more about navigating the ecosystem and connecting the best pieces brought to market.

Leonard: We’re further along now. Once you get the C-level support and get past the threshold of change, then you build trust and it’s easier to move forward.

Q: What’s the best innovation out there?

Wendy: Accessibility to healthcare beyond the local environment and the global implications of providing care and extending care more broadly.

Q: What’s the best thing about CarePass?

Martha: Allowing people to see a different future with data and get them there. We’re excited about all the things you can plug into mobile. You can revolutionize access to care around the world.

Leonard: The $7 trillion impact of mobile in low and middle income countries across the globe. A lot of more simple technologies will be transplanted from countries around the world.

Q: Why do people say they want mHealth but not everyone is using it?

Wendy: The existence of mobile technology in places where there is no alternative of care allows for quick adoption. Here in the U.S., the alternative is the person, the doctor. We have an immense amount of data from the traditional care delivery approach and less reliable evidence and data to allow doctors to let go and feel more comfortable with mobile. Mobile as a new means of communication is difficult to assess the impact.

Q: What advice would you give to startups?

Wendy: Do your homework around issues that pharma is dealing with. Vendors come in and talk about solutions that don’t connect to our business strategy. We’re looking for ideas that address our challenges and solve real problems.

Leonard: You have to do a lot of research ahead of time. We used to let everyone in. It was a disaster for entrepreneurs pitching to executives and not doing their homework. It’s important to understand the business goals. If you’re going to save lives and money, you have a chance but you really have to differentiate yourself.

Martha: CarePass is attracting developers with new solutions. We’re working collaboratively with other organizations to inspire innovation. We may be further along but not yet attracting the best and brightest. We want to create a community for developers to help us innovate and drive change. https://developer.carepass.com/

 

Blending mHealth and Telemedicine

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The World Congress hosted three conferences in one space this week at the Colonnade here in Boston with a great pool of innovators and thought leaders in the mHealth and telemedicine space.

While the three conferences – mHealth, mHealth Innovation Exchange and the Leadership Summit on Telemedicine – were all unique in focus, I think they could have easily been combined into one conference. With discussions on the latest technologies and initiatives transforming healthcare today, it was hard to choose between attending an mHealth or telemedicine sessions, as they are really one in the same.

Alex Nason, Director of Telehealth at Johns Hopkins Medical, summarized the three conferences’ theme well. ‘It’s the connection to health service delivery that matters.’ Both mHealth and telemedicine are services and means for improving the quality and delivery of care. Connecting payers, providers with patients, we’re all in the ‘service’ of innovating care. And it’s a good service to be in.

In case you missed it, here are the highlights:

mHealth: 

-Consumer Trends for Mobile Solutions

-Building Scalable and Sustainable mHealth Behavior Change

-Joslin Everywhere Diabetes Mobile Health Initiative

-Connected Mobile Health Apps and Consumer Engagement

-Intersection of Social Media, Games and mHealth

-Mobile Monitoring for Chronic Conditions

-Global mHealth Perspectives and Challenges

Telemedicine Summit:

-Transitioning to Virtual Care Models

-Telemedicine Funding Opportunities and Current Initiatives

-Pediatric Specialist Care Delivery via Telemedicine

-TelePsychiatry

-Legal Requirements of Telemedicine

-Virtual Care Team Coordination

-Social Media and Telemedicine

-Prescribing via Telemedicine

The Virtualization of Care

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This year’s World Congress Leadership Summit on Telemedicine features a great lineup of speakers. Joining innovators from major hospitals and healthcare delivery organizations, we’re excited to hear about the industry-wide interest and demand for telemedicine use in care delivery.

One of the more interesting sessions was the keynote panel discussion on the Joslin Diabetes Center’s ‘Joslin Everywhere’ diabetes mobile health initiative and efforts to virtualize the delivery of care.

Panelists included Chief Medical Officer Martin Abrahamson, Chief Information Officer Ed Charbonneau and WebCare Program Manager Paul Penta. The focus of their panel was on efforts to improve quality, extend their specialist reach by supporting providers at affiliate sites, improving clinical metrics and collaboration with partners in the healthcare field. Through the use of new and innovative tools to train and engage patients to promote better care management, Joslin is establishing itself as a leader in diabetes care and ensuring care anywhere and ‘everywhere.’

Stay tuned for more updates throughout and after the conference.

iMedicine and Mobile Panel

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SBR Health hosted a panel discussion at Boston’s first ever iMedicine and Mobile Summit on ‘Trends in Utilizing Mobile Televideo Technologies to Improve Healthcare Access.’

Studies have shown that successful use of real time communications such as televideo can profoundly benefit patients and doctors alike. Health care outcomes improve when truly collaborative communication takes place among doctors, specialists. However, until recently the specialized equipment, complexity and expensive network infrastructure required by video, as well as poor Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policies made it impractical to utilize televideo technologies for the delivery of care unless the patient was a great distance from the doctor.

Now, changing reimbursement models and low-cost mobile based televideo technologies are making it easy and cost effective to utilize televideo in a wider array of patient and inter-clinician interactions. Hence, it is now practical to utilize televideo for a much larger population of patients who may not need to travel long distances but still be able to be better served if they could avoid traveling. With these types of applications, health care professionals would have simple efficient communications tools to increase access to specialists, raise the overall levels of patient care, and improve delivery of treatment.

Our featured panelists included Rick Hampton, Wireless Communications Manager at Partners HealthCare; John Moore, Founder and Managing Partner at Chilmark Research; Adam Strom, Director of Research and Design at WorldClinic; David Judge, Medical Director, Ambulatory Practice of the Future at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Shawn Farrell, Telemedicine and Telehealth Program Manager at Children’s Hospital Boston.  Chris Herot, CEO of SBR Health, served as moderator for the panel.