By THCBist

What else could lie in store? We talked with Nuance’s Nick Van Terheyden, who remains optimistic.

Nick van Terheyden, MD, CMIO, Nuance Communications

2015 will be the year well-designed interfaces will transform health IT legacy systems into sleeker, more intuitive, and cost-effective technology.

We know that good usability works hand-in-hand with accessibility to remove the burden from the end user, allowing her to focus on more important tasks— and nowhere is this more important than in healthcare.  In the coming year, we will see a major uptick in the availability of secure health IT access on mobile devices that better support physicians in their natural, fast-paced environment, whether it is through clinical speech recognition technology, gestures, or touch.  Physicians are consumers, too, and want and need the convenience of anywhere, anytime access to information.

We will also start to see the breakdown of silos in patient and physician technologies.  The devices we rely on to track our vitals and help us stay active will begin to integrate in meaningful ways with clinical data, providing us with more awareness about our health and supplying our physicians with useful information about our health trends.  Wearables will become a staple, leading to a healthier population and reducing overall healthcare costs.  After all, what good is having a smart watch track all this data if it can’t help keep you healthier?