Connected Health and Accelerating the Adoption of #mHealth

I attended the Connected Healthcare Conference in San Diego yesterday
Accelerate mHealth Adoption: Deliver Results through Data Driven Business Models for End-User Engagement

Never has there been so much to play for in the mobile health landscape, a revolution is just round the corner with key players from the health care and consumer markets coming together to develop the mHealth industry. This Connected Health Summit will create a bridge bringing together hospitals, clinicians, providers, payers, software and hardware innovators, consumer groups and the wireless industry.

You can find the agenda here and the organizers will be publishing the presentations - there were many interesting insights

Andrew Litt, MD (@DrAndyLitt) (Principal at Cornice Health Ventures, LLC) opened the conference with a great overview of the industry and a slew of challenges and opportunities.

He sees our industry in Phase 1 - the Capture and Digitization of records
and we have yet to really move and explore Phase 2:

Move and Exchnage Data AND Analyze and Manage Data that is linked to Information Driven decision Making

And Phase 3:

Managing Patient Health

In our need to move from data to analysis and information he cited a statistic from a white paper: Analytics: The Nervous System of IT-Enabled Healthcare that sadly puts 80% of data in the EMR unstructured.
This is a fixable problem today with Clinical Language Understanding and we are seeing some results and a change in the industry to stop looking to doctors to be data entry clerks
He also cited Hospitals:

Hospitals are "remarkably inefficient organizations" - Andrew Litt #ConenctedHealth - #bigdata could help fix this
— Nick van Terheyden (@drnic1) October 14, 2014

Technology offers tremendous scope to not only fix these problems but get ahead of the problem (as is done in other industries like the Airline industry that has rebooked your flights before you even land and miss your connection). As he suggested could we use data to understand who is likely to develop a heart attack in the next 2 hours and try and change this outcome

But integrating mHealth into our workflow requires an mHealth Ecosystem:

mHealth needs an ecosystem that improves workflow and integrates data to reduce clinicians workload. This is why doctors and clinicians are resisting mHealth - they don’t like the change to the workflow that has little if any positive effect (for the doctor - they may have a positive effect for the individuals health) of reducing clinicians workload

Interesting comment on wearables and the perspective of doctors on these devices:

What bothers the doctor - mostly the people who are buying and using wearable fitness/activity trackers are the people that are young healthy fit and want to prove to (themselves/others) that they are young fit and healthy?

His graphic on Security and privacy was on the money:

Essential to balance Privacy of Health with interoperability but trust is the imperative
The stats he presented were troubling (at best)

• 96% - Percentage of all healthcare providers that had at least one data breach in the past two years
• 18 Million - Number of patients whose protected health information was breached between 2009 and 2011
• 60% - Proportion of healthcare providers that have had 2 or more breaches in the past 2 years
• 65% - Proportion of breaches reported involving mobile devices
• $50 - Black market value of a health record

The healthcare industry is under attack and is the most attacked industry today:

You might find these figures of the value of Healthcare data as it is valued on the black-market

Another interesting data point:

HIMSS records a total of 11,000 Healthcare Technology companies - less than 100 are large size and the balance of 10,900 are small business that are essentially capturing and scattering your data across many systems and data repositories...

Multiple other presentations and panelists that were all insightful. As always Jack Young (@youngjhmb) from Qualcomm Life Venture fund had some great insights - impossible to capture all of them but here are some:

Healthcare is moving out of the hospital into the home for many reasons but cost is a big driver:

and he suggested there was at least $1.5 Trillion in economic value as the industry shifts (shifting vs replacement?)

Many were surprised by his stat that users check their smart phone at least 150 times per day (just looking around my world this seems low) - in fact a quick check online suggests this is no longer valid and it is probably 221 times per day. Given this device is the one thing we will not leave home without and it now contains a range of sensors including:

• Accelerometer
• Gyroscope
• Magnetometers
• GPS
• Cameras
• Infrared
• Touchscreen
• Finger print
• Force
• NFC
• WiFi/Bluetooth/Cellular

We have the potential for more passive compliance with our patients (and as many stated in their presentations likely more accurate as self reported data is notoriously inaccurate)
He predicted a a 10x growth in wearables from 2014 - 2018 with 26% of this growth attributable to smart watches (I know hard to believe at this point but I think if you looked back 4 years ago the iPad had nothing like the level of penetration it does today)
iPad Growth Rate

I liked his assessment of the werable market place by researching the eBay Discount against the price of the new device:

and even worse for Smart Watches

I also presented “mHealth Reimbursement - Who Will Pay:
You can see it here at Slideshare or below:

mHealth Reimbursement : Who Will Pay? from Nick van Terheyden