Could an early-adopter mHealth executive actually make his own care mobile?
After a chance genome test led to a cure for his kidney cancer, Eric Dishman undertook a mobile health experiment.
Indeed, his role as Intel Fellow and general manager of health and life sciences affords him connections to top health CEOs, senators and financial resources that offer advantages many patients do not have.
But describing the answer as “tough love” for mobile health proponents and realities, Dishman said the results were discouraging. “We’re not quite there yet,” he said. “But the public is.”
Dishman is not alone in wanting to harness mobile technologies to improve care for individual patients.
“I don't think there’s as much patient resistance as we talk about,” said Geeta Nayyar, MD, chief medical information officer at PatientPoint. “Patients are consumers, after all.”
And data that Dishman shared when unveiling Intel’s Healthcare Innovation Barometer at the HIMSS Media mHealth Summit certainly backs that up. Intel’s study, spanning eight countries, essentially determined that 70 percent of respondents are receptive to using toilet sensors, prescription bottle sensors or swallowed monitors, while 66 percent indicated a preference for a personalized healthcare regimen and 53 percent are willing to trust a personally-administered test.
“Physicians are starting to address patient demand for mHealth but they’re being cautious not to let the genie out of the bottle without understanding the ramifications,” said Sid Kosaraju, managing director of Accenture’s health management services.
Grasping the potential impact and getting physicians to engage with patients via mobile technologies will not be easy.
Foundationally, advancing mHealth will come down to what acting national coordinator for Health IT Jacob Reider, MD, rattled off as a series of S’s for scaling integrated data – simple, streamlined, smart, spectrum and the ONC’s own domain of standards and semantics.
Add an agreed-upon understanding of relevant terms, Reider added, since healthcare providers sometimes use different words to mean the same thing and similar words to describe very different intentions. “We have to talk about the same things,” he said.
As we move into the new world of mHealth, we must measure the efficacy and effectiveness of apps and maintain a classification system to know that the apps are secure, and that requires a much more rigorous evaluation to hold apps to a higher standard, said Stefan Linn, senior vice president strategy and global pharma solutions at IMS.
Whereas certifying EHRs is a software-only matter, certifying an mHealth app that costs, say, $30, as things stand today would require separate testing for privacy and security, CPU and network usage, hardware, operating systems, platforms, interoperability and clinical functionality.
“That’s only the tip of the iceberg,” said Amit Trivedi, program manager for healthcare at ICSA Labs, a Verizon-owned EHR certification body.
Trivedi added that payment reform broadly and telehealth specifically promise to advance mHealth.
“So much depends on the changing payment model,” he said. “Once telehealth gets reimbursed, then we can practice medicine how we need to.”
mHealth apps also will have to assimilate into existing protocols and workflows and be untethered so both ends are mobile, said Kevin Lasser, CEO of JEMS Technology, a provider of video telehealth services. “The technology has to be invisible,” he said.
Echoing that, Beaufort Memorial Hospital CIO Ed Ricks said his goal is to make the IT invisible from clinicians.
“The technology is so cool now that nobody has to care about technology for technology’s sake as much as what it does,” he said.
Ultimately, Linn said, mHealth will take a place next to other therapeutics. “Digital therapeutics,” he said, “is the next frontier.”
