Tag Archives: mobile

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

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.

SBR Health Q&A: The mobile shift in healthcare

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Everything is moving to mobile these days, and healthcare is no exception. Christopher Herot, co-founder and CEO of SBR Health, is a recognized business and technology leader who has spent years developing and evaluating video, mobile and real-time video communications solutions. In this one-on-one interview, Chris shares his thoughts and predictions for how mobile technology will transform the healthcare space and beyond. From how we buy care to keeping in touch with family, mobile’s intersection and influence on our daily lives is significant.

How have you seen this shift?

There was a time when every young ambitious professional had a day planner. The iPad is now the equivalent. It’s your phone, calendar, email, entertainment, and computer – your method of communication for everything. This has really transformed a number of industries. Retailing is now different. People can do comparison-shopping using their phone. It’s even changed travel to some degree. You can get your boarding pass on your phone and check into places on Foursquare. For the longest time, it looked like healthcare was not a tech-savvy field but this is quickly changing.

What role does mobile play in the healthcare space?

iPads are taking the medical world by storm. They’re just the right form factor for healthcare. Apple reimagined what you can do with a tablet and has provided for an entirely new experience. Doctors don’t want other tablets. They want the iPad.

Some thought early tablets failed in terms of usability based on size but Apple demonstrated it wasn’t just about size but more about the user experience. There’s something truly unique about being able to type medical information while looking at your patient. This increases physician-patient engagement.

What’s the benefit?

There’s proven clinical value. Tablets have given doctors better access to tests and other medical information. A recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that iPads help doctors be more efficient at ordering tests and procedures for their patients. My thesis is that iPads allow physicians to do more in real time and make healthcare more convenient.

The real and long-term benefit of mobile technology is in bending the cost curve in healthcare. This goes beyond getting doctors to accept lower fees and cut down on unnecessary tests. The bulk of the cost is to get Americans to stop eating so many donuts. The way you make people healthier is to make it easier and convenient for people to see their doctor. This will drastically cut healthcare costs.

Why?

The demand for mobile reflects where we’re at as a society. The doctor is not always in his office ready to take your call, and so many of us are on the go. Being able to get access to the healthcare system wherever you are – work, home, out and about – is really critical. To make that work, we have to be able to see the patient and share what we see with other people. Tablets are small enough to be portable but also have real data on the screen.

How will this be adopted?

It will happen fastest where the payment model is evolving away from the fee for service. You’re seeing this with concierge practices. Once you make it easier for patients and doctors to do a virtual visit, I expect the adoption will expand to other parts of the world. There are places like the payers and insurance companies who see this as a way to improve healthcare delivery. You’ll see this first in places that have the luxury of not having to worry about restrictions. Concierge and post-acute follow up are prime examples.

SBR Health is developing the technology that will enable videoconferencing and real-time communications to benefit patients and doctors alike. Healthcare outcomes improve when collaborative communication that’s convenient takes place among doctors, specialists and patients, and we’re working to make it as simple and secure as possible.