High-tech monitors, cool gadgets help spark a health care revolution
As the world becomes more digitized, the health care industry is racing to keep up, sparking an explosion of new digital technology geared to improving patient care.
Most visible to patients is the move to electronic medical records, or EHRs, by doctors and hospitals in an effort to streamline record-keeping and meet federal guidelines. But that's only one of dozens of new tech advances that are designed to make life better for the ill, elderly and disabled.
From practicing telemedicine to experimenting with 3-D printing, hundreds of entrepreneurs and innovators a
re working to reinvent the health care wheel. Attendance at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's annual health IT conference has nearly doubled in the last decade, says Carla Smith, the organization's executive vice president. . She sees that as evidence that technologies are "emerging and maturing sufficiently to meet the needs for optimal, safe and cost-effective patient care."
Some recent innovations:
• "Smart" helmet. Helmets that have technology embedded in them can send alerts when an athlete may have a concussion after a collision
• Asthma breath app. Asthmatic patients can blow into their iPhone and the data are automatically sent to the doctor.
• Ingestible sensors with accompanying patch. Edible sensors have no batteries or antennae and are powered by stomach fluids. The sensor transmits data to a patch on the body that also detects heart rate, activity and rest; that information is sent to the mobile, Bluetooth-enabled device.
• Mobile phone texting for pregnant women. Pregnant women in socioeconomically disadvantaged or rural communities can use this technology to connect with a doctor. It also can be used to remind patients of upcoming vaccines and lab tests.
Health care strategist Marc Olsen compares the magnitude of the current boom in health care technologies to the boom of the Internet in the early 2000s.
But with this boom comes many hurdles, he says. Health care has always been behind other industries by about 20 years, he says, and the field is incredibly complex.
Olsen predicts there will be a high failure rate among emerging companies. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, he says. Success will require more than just one great idea since there are so many different variations of health care and so many regulations to meet.
"Someone's health care isn't just a widget," he says. "You can't just create a single product that works for everyone."
The industry is headed in a positive direction, he says, but there is still much more that needs to be done.
Entrepreneur Unity Stoakes co-founded StartUp Health – a long-term program focused on helping young digital health companies navigate their way through the fledgling market.
"On the health care industry side, all the tools and data that they have access to are being reinvented," Stoakes says.
Some of the companies StartUp health is currently working with include AdhereTech, CarePredict and Cerora. These companies are creating innovative products ranging from a smart pill bottle that notifies doctors when patients have taken their medication to a bracelet that can tell if doctors washed their hands properly.
From household apps to "smart" clothing, technology has, quite literally, seeped its way into the fabric of American's lives. Bill Custer, a professor in the Institute of Health Administration at Georgia State University, says the new technologies offer hope to health care consumers as well as doctors and hospitals.
But this hope will only be realized if the technologies truly enhance quality and reduce costs. So whether the public should be truly optimistic about the future of the industry, Custer says, really depends on how the new technologies are applied.
"Now startups and people who invent new technologies face the challenge of really having to prove that their product will actually do what it promises," Custer says. "Now the industry cannot just accept a new technology for the sake of it being a new technology."
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