Tap into the Booming Mobile Health Market with a Comprehensive Mobile Health Strategy
Christopher Wasden
Global Healthcare Innovation Leader
Healthcare is shifting from a siloed, hierarchical delivery system to one that is more collaborative, transparent and inclusive of patient involvement. Remote monitoring devices and mobile health applications now allow consumers to access their medical records online and monitor their own blood pressure, pulse, blood glucose levels, weight and other vital signs. Mobile health technology is of particular interest to physicians to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and better engage patients.
PwC estimates that the annual US consumer market for remote and mobile healthcare monitoring devices will be as much as $43 billion. Despite the market potential, greater clarity is needed around regulatory and reimbursement issues. Until then, there is an opportunity for companies to do their own self-assessment of the value they are creating.
Research by PwC indicates that companies whose products reflect five broad principles will have the best chance of success. There are a number of important considerations for medical companies as they look to tap into the mHealth market. In this presentation, PwC's Chris Wasden will discuss the five principles for mHealth success:
- Interoperable with other apps, devices, software and personal health records
- Integrated into the care continuum with multiple devices and metrics
- Intelligent and able to make sense of data, create meaning from information and provide real-time, actionable support to modify patient behavior
- Socialized so as to sustain behavioral change through a community effect and interpersonal engagement
- Outcome-oriented and able to document, measure and validate, to confirm performance and results
The presenter will outline how mHealth products can comply with each of the five principles to achieve acceptance and success, citing specific examples. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be armed with the tools to implement a comprehensive mobile health strategy.
The mHealth Revolution - What's Your Wi-Fi Prognosis?
Brian Mason
Director of Product Management at Xirrus, Inc.
Wireless networks are now giving caregivers unprecedented access to diagnostic tools, patients' status, prescriptions and medication. To support the mobility needs of healthcare; more Wi-Fi enabled devices are rapidly working their way into hospitals and other healthcare facilities. For these devices to work properly Wi-Fi Coverage alone is not enough - IT must support greater densities, higher bandwidths and support any application over a diverse set of devices.
Learn how to achieve immediacy and mobility by properly designing your wireless network to support the impeding influx of wireless devices and applications (hint: just throwing up more access points is not the answer). Providing density on demand requires a scalable architecture. Learn how Xirrus addresses the explosive growth of mobile Wi-Fi devices with technology that meets today's demands for scalability.
The Risks of Software Driven Devices
Executive Director at eProtex
As healthcare providers scramble to meet new mandates, independent audits reveal a collective failure in electronic data protection as it relates to connected medical devices. From iPhones to surgical lights and smart beds, any device transmitting data to a network is a potential target or launch pad for security breaches if left unprotected.
The outcome? Potential data loss, patient misdiagnosis, hefty penalties and jail time-not to mention a PR nightmare. "Someone in this room has a smartphone with a virus on it and you just don't know it," Jeffrey Short, an attorney specializing in healthcare IT, shared with our audience at a recent conference. "You plug that into a network and it could infect every single device connected to the network." "Worse yet, it can harm patients," added Dr. Jeffrey Rose, Ascension Health's VP of Clinical Excellence and Informatics.
"It's one thing to say, 'The CT scanner isn't working.' But what if you impact the CT scanner in a way that delivers an abnormally-high dose of radiation?" One obstacle is that clinical engineers who care for medical devices and the IT department aren't equipped to discern how individual devices and the network impact one another. "Between them, there's this 'neverland' of finger-pointing over a bunch of devices that could take down both sides," Dr. Rose explained. "You're looking at HIPAA risk, malware risk and malfunction risk with direct patient ramifications."
"You don't think it will happen to you," says Earl Reber, executive director for eProtex, "and then you read the news of it happening to your peers, almost daily." In 2009, nearly 80 million health records were breached, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
With so much at stake, healthcare leaders can no longer afford not having a firm grasp on these blind spots. Learning Objectives: explore data security blind spots unique to software-driven devices; examine the business and clinical repercussions of these commonly-missed threats; and identify action steps to minimize or reverse risks.
Cellphone-based Optometry Solution Using Inverse Shack Hartmann Technique
Vitor Pamplona
NETRA Project Leader
We introduce a mobile eye diagnostic that consists of an extremely low cost (< $2) clip-on eye piece and a mobile phone that allows for anyone to take an eye exam and get a prescription for glasses & screened for cataracts, without the assistance of a trained professional. While expensive optical devices for automatic estimation of those diseases exist, our goal is to greatly simplify the mechanism by putting the human subject in the loop.
NETRA is the inverse of a popular optometric device called the Shack-Hartmann wavefront aberrometer. The design involves placing a microlens array or a pin-hole array over a cell phone display. The subject looks into this display at a very close range and aligns displayed patterns. Via this platform, we create a new range of interactivity that is extremely sensitive to parameters of the human eye, such as the refractive errors, focal range, focusing speed, lens opacity, etc.
We compute the refractive error by asking the user to interactively move spots until they are aligned on the retina. The spot movements compensate for the wavefront aberrations present in the human eye. By repeating this procedure for eight meridians, required refractive correction is computed. We exploit the fact that aberrations are expressed using only a few parameters to create an easier user interaction approach.
We assess cataracts by crafting an interactive solution that measures the perceptual impact of forward scattering on the foveal region. We create collimated beams of light to scan through sub-apertures, scattering light as it strikes a cataract. User feedback generates maps for opacity, attenuation, contrast and local point-spread functions. The compiled maps are used to reconstruct the cataract-affected view of an individual, offering a unique approach for capturing information for screening, diagnostic, and clinical analysis.
How to Ensure High-Quality Mobile Apps for Healthcare to Minimize Risk of Failure
Leila Modarres
Smart phones and other smart devices are penetrating medical organizations as a preferred information and resource delivery platform. The use of internally-developed mobile applications to diagnose, treat, transmit data, monitor and provide care to patients help streamline and increase the efficiency of everyday tasks and effectiveness of medical professional care-giving.
However, when it comes to managing the health of patients, the mobile applications must be trusted to work as they are intended to, function flawlessly and integrate seamlessly with pre-existing software and applications within the medical community. Failure to assure this can put lives at stake. Thoroughly executing each step of the application development cycle is critical to creating quality applications that help medical professionals streamline their work.
Testing mobile healthcare applications to quality assure them prior to deployment is the most vital measure to ensure that the applications will work properly and guarantee that caregivers have the most up-to-date information about their patients. Even then, monitoring the functionalities of the applications post-rollout is imperative to make sure they are performing correctly.
In this presentation, CEO of DeviceAnywhere, Faraz Syed, will leverage his experience with healthcare organizations - including Kaiser Permanente, McKesson and GE Healthcare - to discuss best practices in developing, deploying and monitoring mobile health and telemedicine applications; highlight the proper steps to optimize application functionalities for medical professionals from pre-rollout testing to post-rollout monitoring and quality assurance; and provide practical advice on tools and techniques that will help medical mobile application developers streamline the mobilization efforts of the medical community.