While most providers know that smart phones can run neat healthcare apps, with new products on the market every day, few healthcare stakeholders are up to date on the ways in which digital healthcare has blossomed in the US. Those who ignore digital health's potential will be left behind quickly—the revolution is already underway.
Of course, there will always be holdouts who will have no part of a new technology. But it's not fair to compare doctors' resistance to using EHRs to digital health products with easy-to-use, consumer-facing interfaces—primarily because there isn't anything like a usable EHR out there yet.
I've been keeping a close eye on the emergence of digital health tech that is poised to play a very meaningful role in transforming how care is delivered. Here's some trends that are likely to flower in 2015.
1. Population health via mobile
As early adopters have experimented with mobile health technology, some have begun to leverage mobile devices as a means of tracking populations more closely. In particular, early research suggests that several chronic illnesses, including asthma, diabetes and heart disease, can be managed more effectively when consumers and providers share data in real time. It’s important to note that population health management platforms, designed to organize mobile data, are new and immature. Still, IT vendors with immense resources are also creating products, including Philips, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung. Someone will get it right, and probably soon.
2. Cheap, accessible diagnostic testing
Startups across the mobile health world are hoping to lower the costs of diagnosing patients. For example, a California startup named Scanadu is preparing to roll out a gadget allowing consumers to do urine tests at home, to be priced, sources suggest, at a consumer-accessible level. Another vendor, Mobisante, has developed ultrasound platform which requires only a wand, a smartphone and an app to run. These two approaches alone could dramatically reduce testing costs for many patients, and in turn take some of the cost burden off of employers and payers.
3. Team-based care enabled digitally
Though this is still a very new market niche within digital health, it could grow rapidly this year. A small handful of companies are developing software that when implemented will leverage the "always on" relationships people have with their phones. These companies hope to make patient care hand-offs simpler, keep providers informed when a patient's data stream suggest they're struggling and reinforce a team ethos among everyone caring for a patient.
4. The marriage of sensor arrays and mobile tech
Most professionals outside the digital health scene may not know this, but there's some very active development efforts going on to build more sensor-laden watches, clothing and even ingestible "pill" sensors. As with other mobile health models, these objects will feed data to patients' smartphones, and the smartphone will speed the data to providers and even amateur caregivers. It's too soon yet to determine whether new forms of monitoring, such as smart clothing, will be an industry hit. But the very fact that such alternatives are being discussed in the mHealth world suggests that these entrepreneurs have at least a little bit of traction. If they get it right, they could pick up a lot more this year.
5. Doctors and hospitals get more savvy
As we've covered here before, providers are investing in digital health and even taking incubators for connected/mobile health under their own roof. While some clinicians may still feel overwhelmed by the prospect of coping with lots of digital data, the vendors of tools to manage the flow are becoming more sophisticated daily. Ultimately, as the mobile health industry pulls one rabbit out of the hat after another, and clinicians see the value of digital health strategies, it will change the way medicine is practiced and almost certainly improve outcomes.