Blink: Your Digital Health Care is Now
While being an attendee at the business-to-business Digital Health Conference 2012 held in NYC on October 15-16th was fascinating, it was an extraordinary look at how technology is transforming the medical treatment of a future patient.
Technology is lighting up the health care world faster than the speed of 4G and your high speed Internet connection.
“Big Data” is a collection of data sets too large and complex to manage by most companies. Health care data is “big data” on steroids, data from an industry connecting 7 billion people to 80 million health care providers. One huge piece of this data set is our personal health data that has been fed into Electronic Health Records (EHR).
I’d certainly heard of EHR’s, thinking how smart it sounded to have our medical records in the computer, and feeling a sense of safety that different doctors miles apart have easy access to these same records. Such records save time and provide critical information about allergies, and more.
My musings weren’t even close to grasping the magnitude of how instituting EHRs will change our healthcare world. The changes are mostly remarkable for how “big data” can be fed into systems to help everyone in the medical industry. For patients, emergent software resulting from such data-gathering should improve health and even be life saving.
Wired Up
In the future, you may elect to be wired with remote body sensors. For example, Preventice software provides state of the art medical sensors that can track your ECGs, heart rate, respiration rate, and activity and send reports to the appropriate medical personnel. Preventice’s Body Guardian is designed for the remote management of individuals with cardiac arrhythmias. The same company’s remote monitoring technology offers insight into an individual’s environment through temperature monitors, motion sensors, and other devices that help ensure safety and well-being
Beyond Lucid Technologies has developed software to “connect the dots” during the critical moments between an emergency incident and the EMS arrival; and between EMS arrival and patient drop-off at the care facility. In time, medical 911 calls may be a thing of the past as your body sensor equipment will let the ambulance crew know you need help before you even know it yourself.
More Personalized Engagement with Your Care
Many companies are offering software to connect you to your wellness plan with personalized reminders, rewards, trackers, and other tools to increase adherence to prescribed care plans.
Avado’s Patient Relationship Management System allows doctors and patients to track, share, and manage medical information with each other and coordinate health issues outside the doctor’s office.
“Learning Action Networks,” such as IPRO, are springing up to help you manage an illness.
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