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Tag: mHealth

Apple Watch Leaves Patients Connected with No Where To Go

By GRACE CORDOVANO, Ph.D., BCPA

The highly anticipated unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 4 caused a news and social media sensation. Apple coined the iconic timepiece as the “guardian of your health”, with health tracking functionalities such as the ability to detect atrial fibrillation (AFib) by a self-performed electrocardiogram (ECG). But from patients’ and carepartners’ perspectives, there is a long road to a universally accessible, seamlessly implemented, mass-adoption, and meaningful use for this wearable technology.

Many experts, such as Dr. Eric Topol a cardiologist at the Scripps Research Institute, and other reports, were quick to highlight concerns about the consequences of false positives. The Apple Watch was criticized as a source for unnecessary anxiety. A letter from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) of the FDA, which cleared the ECG app as a class II over-the-counter (OTC) device, highlighted the risks to health and potential mitigation measures that the Apple Watch posed. Unfortunately, the vast majority of concerns in the public domain haven’t emphasized the risks to health due to poor implementation, integration, and adoption strategies of digital tools and wearables.

The current health care system needs to be significantly refreshed as it is not positioned to simply drop in advancements, such as those offered by the Apple Watch Series 4, into everyday patient care. Having Dr. Ivor Benjamin, president of the American Heart Association (AHA), endorse the Apple Watch at the Apple Keynote Event did wonders for the mass marketing appeal. It would’ve have been more credible and demonstrated more value if he stated that the AHA devised a strategic clinical practice implementation guide for cardiologists, created patient education materials for using the Apple Watch, partnered with payers to incentivize doctors to adopt the technology, and reimburse for virtual consults to support remote patient monitoring (RPM).

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‘Immigrants’ Bring Patient Engagement Energy

An Irish software expert who’d been helping companies sell on eBay walks into a room with a Slovenian inventor who’d built a world-class company in the “accelerator beam diagnostics market.” (Don’t ask.) What they share is not just foreign birth, but “immigration” to health care from other fields. Both have come to the MedCity Invest conference in Chicago seeking funding for start-ups focused on patient engagement. They’re not alone in their “immigrant” status, and their experience holds some important lessons.

Eamonn Costello, chief executive officer of patientMpower, works out of a rehabbed brick building in Dublin next to the famed Guinness brewery at St. James Gate. An electronic engineer who’s worked at companies like Tellabs, Costello became interested in healthcare in 2012 when his father was in and out of the hospital with pancreatic cancer. What struck him was the lack of any monitoring on how patients fared between doctor appointments or hospitalizations.

When in 2014 a friend working in healthcare approached him, they looked at building an app for different illnesses.Continue reading…

Research Bites Dog

Screen Shot 2016-04-03 at 10.42.56 AMWe live in a headline/hyperlinked world.  A couple of years back, I learned through happenstance that my most popular blog posts all had catchy titles.  I’m pretty confident that people who read this blog do more than scan the titles, but there is so much information coming at us these days, it’s often difficult to get much beyond the headline.  Another phenomenon of information overload is that we naturally apply heuristics or short cuts in our thinking to avoid dealing with a high degree of complexity.  Let’s face it: it’s work to think!

In this context, I thought it would be worth talking about two recent headlines that seem to be set backs for the inexorable forward march of connected health.  These come in the form of peer reviewed studies, so our instinct is to pay close attention.

In fact, one comes from an undisputed leader in the field, Dr. Eric Topol.  His group recently published a paper where they examined the utility of a series of medical/health tracking devices as tools for health improvement in a cohort of folks with chronic illness.  In our parlance, they put a feedback loop into these patients’ lives.  It’s hard to say for sure from the study description, but it sounds like the intervention was mostly about giving patients insights from their own data.  I don’t see much in the paper about coaching, motivation, etc.

If it is true that the interactivity/coaching/motivation component was light, that may explain the lackluster results.  We find that the feedback loops alone are relatively weak motivators.  It is also possible that, because the sample included a mix of chronic illnesses, it would be harder to see a positive effect.  One principle of clinical trial design is to try to minimize all variables between the comparison groups, except the intervention.  Having a group with varying diseases makes it harder to say for sure that any effects (or lack of effects) were due to the intervention itself.

Dr. Topol is an experienced researcher and academician.  When they designed the study, I am confident they had the right intentions in mind.  My guess is they felt like they were studying the effect of mobile health and wearable technology on health (more on that at the end of the post). But you can see that, in retrospect, the likelihood of teasing out a positive effect was relatively low.

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My Doctor Just Gave Me His Cell Phone Number …

flying cadeuciiThat’s right…it really happened.

At the conclusion of a recent doctor visit, he gave me his cell phone number saying, “Call me anytime if you need anything or have questions.”

In disbelief, I wondered if this was a generational thing – and whether physicians in their late thirties had now ‘gone digital’.

My only other data point was our family pediatrician, who is also in her late thirties. Our experience with her dates back nearly seven years when my wife and I were expecting twins.  A few pediatricians we met with mentioned their willingness to correspond with patients’ families via email as a convenience to parents.  The pediatrician we ultimately selected wasn’t connected with patients outside of the office at that time, but now will exchange emails.

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Could mHealth Apps Be a Reprise of the EHR? The Need For Clinician Input

flying cadeuciiWhile your humble correspondent continues to delight in the emerging science of “mHealth” as a newly minted start-up Chief Medical Officer, he ran across this interesting article on risk and patient safety.

Authors Thomas Lewis and Jeremy Wyatt worry that “apps” can lead to patient harm.

They posit that the likelihood of harm is mainly a function of 1) the nature of the mistake itself (miscalculating a body mass index is far less problematic than miscalculating a drug dose) and 2) its severity (overdosing on a cupcake versus a narcotic).  When you include other “inherent and external variables,” including the display, the user interface, network issues, information storage, informational complexity and the number of patients using it, the risks can grow from a simple case of developer embarrassment to catastrophic patient loss of life.

In response, they propose that app developers think about  this “two dimensional app space” that relies on a risk assessment coupled to a staggered regulation model.  That regulation can range from simple clinical self assessment to a more complex and formal approval process.

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Health 2.0 is now mHealth & Associates

After years of speculation about a possible name change, Health 2.0 has become mHealth & Associates. My partner Co-Chairman and CEO Indu Subaiya and I didn’t take this move lightly. We were though concerned that the tired “2.0” moniker is now thoroughly discredited by the emergence of the fully interoperable semantic Web, particularly as it’s been demonstrated in the healthcare sector in the US in recent years. In addition leading luminaries such as Chris Schroeder have finally realized the importance of the brand new smart phone devices that we’ve been ignoring for most of the last decade. And after some prompting, we were convinced by the intellectual rigor of the wider mHealth movement with its clear definition of mobile health, including the incorporation of highly portable technologies such as televisions bolted to the walls of hospital rooms.

Admittedly, while mHealth Intelligence and the mHealth Challenge roll off the tongue, we were a little stuck by what to call our main Fall conference–our organization’s best known event. But while mHealth Summit, mHealth Conference and most other variants are already in use, we think that clear market visibility will surround out new name. So instead of the 8th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference, this September we’ll welcome you to the First mHealth Confabulation.

Finally we wanted to acknowledge the role of  our wider movement, our team and our 75 chapters across the globe, so we have added the “*& Associates” moniker to the name. In recognition of their contributions all mHealth colleagues will now be known as Mobile Health Associates or in its shortened version, as an “mHealth Ass.” Indu has suggested that I adopt the title of “Biggest mHealth Ass.”

Power Up: What’s Next in Technology for Youth and Wellness

It’s time for those of us working in health tech to power up—and use our health tech muscle to make a real and lasting difference in young people’s lives.

In video games, power ups restore game characters’ health, increase their strength, shield them from damage, give them special abilities, and help them beat the odds. In health tech, power ups can help us find winning solutions for improving young people’s health and wellness.

Power Ups for Youth Health Tech:

  • Data-Driven (+1 Power Up) – Data can inform new research and spark insights, and well-visualized data can transform perceptions and change behavior. Young people prefer when information is shown, rather than stated. Use data visualizations to help young people understand how they fit into the big picture.
  • Connected (+1) – Health tech cannot be tied down by time, place, or even platform. A safe, connected, networked, multi-platform mindset should be our default.
  • Agile (+5) – We need to learn quickly what works, keep what does, and discard what doesn’t. You only get one chance with young people, so you’d better make it good.
  • Innovative (+10) – At its best, health tech will be creative and even disruptive. Let’s focus on radically accelerating and scaling our best solutions.
  • Authentic (+25) – Trust is the most indispensable currency for dealing with youth. Period.
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Come to the Health 2.0 session at the 2013 mHealth Summit

Join Health 2.0 for an afternoon at the mHealthSummit – Dec 9th near Washington DC, at the Gaylord Convention Center!

 

First, we reveal the first ever Health 2.0 Annual Report – an insider’s guide to the 7th Annual Fall Conference, our biggest event yet. With company profiles that detail products, services, and why each presenter was selected for our stage, the Report captures all the trends and analysis you may have missed. Pre-order your copy of the report by emailing Kim Krueger. Available December 10th.

While the government is scrambling to get their exchange up and running smoothly, other tools are popping up everywhere for consumers to make smarter decisions about their insurance coverage. Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Matthew Holt take the stage in The New Marketplace to review companies making waves in health care insurance.

Don’t miss Future of Self-Tracking and Personalized Medicine and Clinical and Population Data for Transforming Care which will cover the latest consumer quantifying tools, and how health care professionals are aggregating millions of these patient data points to streamline and provide better care.

Unmentionables is back!  Leigh Calabrese-Eck of Eliza moderates this session about life’s buffers and magnifiers.

We’ll wrap the afternoon by revealing the new Health 2.0 Database, a go-to aggregated source for all players in the industry today.

LIVE demos from:  GetInsuredWebMDConnectedHealthIntuitOk Copay – Pokitdok – Azumio – BetterFit TechnologyWithingsAetna CarePassHumetrixAlereElation EMRathenahealthManTherapyMeQuillibriumUT MD Anderson Sexual Health Innovations – and more!

You can register for this session as a stand-alone or in addition to the whole event.

Making Health Addictive

I first posed the question, “Could Mobile Health Become Addictive?” on August 20th.  Since then I’ve done more thinking and I’m warming to the concept.

To start with, addiction is a word laden with negative meaning.  When we hear the word, we think of opiates, street drugs, cigarettes, or possibly gambling.  In fact, Wikipedia defines addiction as, “the continued repetition of a behavior despite adverse consequences.”  So, with that definition as backdrop, is there any way health can really be addictive?  Probably not.

What I’m really talking about is the juxtaposition of motivational health messaging with some other addictive behavior, specifically checking your smartphone.

New evidence shows that people are in love with these devices, checking them more than 100 times per day!  I’ve heard people are tapping in 110, even 150 times a day. Of course this varies, but let’s face it, we check our smartphones a lot and it’s hard to stop.  A somewhat disturbing video makes the case well.  It’s easy to build a case that smartphones are addictive.

Recent research shows that checking your phone results in a small release of the neurochemical dopamine.  Dopamine release has long been associated with ingestion of addictive substances such as heroin and tobacco.  In fact, once the pattern of ingestion and dopamine release is established, even thinking about the ingestion triggers the dopamine release, the biochemical explanation for cravings.

For this post and a series to follow, I choose not to question whether this compulsive relationship with smartphones is good or bad, but simply to acknowledge that it is common, almost universal among smartphone users and to ask if we can exploit it as tool to improve your health.

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Confessions of a Self-Tracker


Hello.  I am Mike Painter, and I track. I don’t necessarily have a compelling reason to track health parameters such as exercise patterns, heart rate, weight, diet and the occasional blood pressure. Yet I do.  I do most of my tracking with several small devices, simple sensors and software applications. My tracking is also pretty social—meaning I share much of my data widely and daily. You’re welcome to see it—most of it is on Strava. Admittedly, I still keep some data daily on a paper calendar, and I do monitor diet and sleep in my head—i.e., nobody needs to remind me about my food splurge days. The local bakery is intimately aware of that data point as the employees witness me charge in, wild-eyed and drooling for a giant cinnamon roll every Thursday morning—almost without fail.

It all feels pretty normal to me.

Here’s the rest of the story: I track to enhance athletic performance rather than monitor my health, per se, or even really my wellness. I am an avid cyclist and have tracked miles, location, accumulated elevation, heart rate and power readings and other data for years. I share that information with both cyclist colleagues I know and don’t know on Strava. That site eagerly ingests my data—and among other things, plops it into riding (and running) segment leader boards, riding heat maps—and, most importantly, in training, trend graphs like the attached. All that data is incredibly helpful to me—it empowers me by making me face the numbers—it makes my training data- and reality-based. I don’t have to guess to maximize my fitness and minimize my fatigue level in anticipation of a big event. I follow the numbers.

Is all that bad? To me, my obsession with tracking my athletic performance seems like an extension of observing data for health and wellness.

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