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Hospital as Mainframe, Wireless Technology as Liberator
Sometimes the serendipity of airplane readings provides for insightful connections. I thought I’d share one from this week’s travels.
The aha of “hospital as mainframe” came from reading Eric Dishman’s epilogue in Dr. Mike Magee’s excellent recent book, Home-Centered Health Care:
As with mainframe computers only a couple of decades ago, today we have to make a pilgrimage to that hospital mainframe to wait ever so patiently as we time-share those miraculous modern medical capabilties that have been gathered there. In the midst of already ballooning healthcare costs, growing ranks or un-and under-insured, and epidemics of age-related illnesses and injuries, this mainframe model cannot scale to meet the needs of ouj aging population where neither the dollars nor the doctors will exist to deliver healthcare business as usual.
Just as we moved from mainframe to persional computers that are now part of our everyday lives at home, work, and play, so, too, we must redistribute healthcare expertise and equipment from mainframe megaplexes to our homes and to our personal lives. Eric Dishman is General Manager, Health Research & Innovation Group, Intel Corporation. Disclosure: Intel has been a client of Better Health Technologies.
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p dir=”ltr”>OK, sounds good…and just HOW is all this going to happen?
That question is addressed in depth in the just released white paper Health Care Unplugged: The Evolving Role of Wireless Technology. This report was written by Richard Adler for the California HealthCare Foundation.
If you wanted to read just one report to get up to speed on the state-of-the art and the promise of wireless patient focused health care applications, this is the one I’d recommend.
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I think the author is stuck in the current paradigm of physician-centric care delivery and completely underestimates how new technology can be used to improve self-care including system-directed education. In this scenario, the current provider workflows are not affected. If anything they are streamlined without effort since data is automatically transformed into patient feedback outside of traditional care delivery. Smart patients = efficient practice; and there are several studies of this spanning the past 6 years.
Also, too much on phones as the end all be all of ‘wireless’ in medical. Cell phones are only one tool in what I call the ‘Virtual-Loop’ which incorporates all of the interface possibilities (cell, landline, PC, snail-mail, and wireless medical appliances of many varieties only some of which require the phone for transport – others are self-contained WWAN (long-range wireless).)
In the author’s defense, things are moving much faster in this field over the past 12 months than all of the prior 4 years before so it’s tough for anyone to authoritatively present the evolving role of wireless in its entirety.
Kevin,
Of course the report is all about cell phones or more accurately “Smartphones”. What other personal device have you got in your pocket that everything else is (or has already) converged into?
Maybe it’s just your American perspective because you have such poor mobile network speeds and costs.
Unlike in America, in Europe the hype surrounding the iPhone (Time Magazines invention of the year) hasn’t prevented it flopping. When up against the real competition on next generation 3G mobile networks (ie Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson) the iphone is nothing new and way to expensive.
Things are indeed moving very quickly take a look to Asia to see what’s coming to a smartphone in America soon. A book by Jim O’Reilly and Tomi Ahonen called “Digital Korea” is a great read on this.
Given that the article was entitlted “The evolving role of wireless technology” you can see how I was expecting to see more than the cell phone depicted in the future healthcare landscape.
You should read up on the GlucoMON to understand what it means to converge wireless and portable medical devices. Patients use the GlucoMON as the easiest and most accurate way to tap self-care and collaborative features of the Automated Diabetes Management System. This M2M appliance is going on 6 yrs now and is well documented within the diabetes circles here in the US. There is no airtime cost issue either since we take care of that element as a cost of service.
While lots of apps are coming to smart phones, they will always have to contend with a level of complexity that comes from being a general purpose device. When you design a wireless appliance with built-in wireless connectivity the user experience will always be better.
Plenty of data exists to show that adding complexity to the patient regimen will nearly always cause the technology to fall short of its mission.
Kevin,
You seem to have misunderstood the idea of a “smartphone” – it means that the device is smart not that the user has to be smart to use it.
I agree that technology can add complexity to the patient regime but these are just usability issues which are already being sorted out – in much the same way that blackberry smartphones fixed the usability issues of mobile email.
I am aware of your solution but cannot see how it provides lower cost or the “easiest” patient technology – that title surely goes to LG electronics blood glucose testing phone?
Your GlucoMon solution seems to add complexity too because it requires additional devices (a digital tester and docking station) as well as additional network connections (the WWAN you refer to) and they’ve all got to get set up and linked securely to the patient.
Once you accept that everyone has there own unshared mobile phone and that the mass production of these devices is making them cheaper and more capable i think your argument “When you design a wireless appliance with built-in wireless connectivity the user experience will always be better” falls to pieces. Bluetooth and other local wireless connectivity along with the highly personal nature of health devices will ensure that stand alone wirelessly connected medical devices will remain expensive and less reliable.
We actually field test all of these technologies (incl. third party devices) and work directly with patients and providers so my comments are based on experience and feedback from the actual users of these devices including clinical trial data covering GlucoMON, smartphone apps, Bluetooth meters, etc…
Only time will tell which devices are most popular across various patient demographics and which are most effective which may be two entirely different result categories. Our model embraces support for any device that passes our standards of quality and usability.
Paul, if you would like to discuss your field experience in comparison to my own over these past six years I would be happy to take your call.
I agree , going wireless is the way hospitals should go in terms of sharing information such as patient files and medical findings.
In emergency situations time is of the essence , for example a critical patient is in need of treatment and and a more qualified physician is in another hospital , with wireless technology he can simply upload his data into the needed hospital.
There are so many possible applications for this technology in the medical field