7 min reading time

IBM’s Global Medical Device Business Development Leader Stephen Pierce joined last year’s 10x Conference with thoughts on wireless and wearables’ impact on healthcare.

See the replay at http://medgroup.biz/IBM-health (transcript also available)

“A great smartphone app that tracks sleep patterns and activity levels doesn’t necessarily help me to improve my health.”

But “chronic disease management is the primary opportunity we see driving healthcare transformation…. The focus is on reducing cost by taking action earlier in the process, during the earlier intervention stage or even the healthy stage.”

Do you agree with Stephen?

Is chronic disease management where the device community should focus?

Other points from his presentation:
• McKinsey estimates wearable devices may contribute an estimated 10 to 20% cost savings for chronic disease management.

• IBM’s “Internet of Things” initiative would take data from medical and other devices (TVs, cameras, air conditioners, energy-based devices, etc.) to get clinical vitals, activity, dietary, and social components.

• Many of Stephen’s clients want to invest in expensive acute care technologies. But in broad need areas like residential care, assisted living, nursing homes, and homecare, price becomes a critical issue. The same is true for emerging markets.

• Wearable devices are a piece of the picture [but] the real value comes from the data, the insights, and the coordination. Who owns the data?

• Consider technologies outside the wrist space, such as contact lens technology where retinal scans of patients identify predisposition towards diabetes or diabetic retinopathy.

• Creating a longitudinal patient record to filter terabytes of data to provide insights to the clinician, provider, and patient at the right time is meaningful. Effective usage of EMR data is still limited because there’s so much data and not enough time to get meaningful insight from that data.

Watch the video at http://medgroup.biz/IBM-health and comment below.

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OUR “DESIGNING HEALTH” WEBINAR…

… starts in 90 minutes (12 p.m. Eastern Time today) but you can visit http://medgroup.biz/device-design at any time for the replay and slides.

The webinar will cover how consumer vital tracking and clinical grade devices are converging, how to solve problems in development programs, the four types of connectivity solutions, and how to decide which device type and development route is best for your application.

Join us live to ask questions if you can: http://medgroup.biz/device-design

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Make it a great week.

Joe Hage
Medical Devices Group Leader

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Richard J. Scully
Trusted Digital Transformation Leader
roger that!

Adip Dutta
System Design Consultant
@Richard.J
Maybe IOT of Medical Things will change local laws to break boundaries and make healthcare affordable to many,laws need to change but they may only change when people or lawmakers face problems with the existing system, that is a bigger problem than technology. @Ogan and others pointed out rightly the problem is not in technology but the business of healthcare structure itself.

Ogan Gurel MD
Innovation Leader | Executive Mgmt | Academic | Keynote Speaker | Author | Bioelectromagnetics / Terahertz | Mini-MD
From regulatory, to insurance & reimbursement, and data integration & analytic, as well as market & industry structure perspectives, significant impact will only be achieved once the wellness and medical spaces converge. Indeed, the fundamental premise of chronic disease management is to increase and enhance the wellness periods while anticipating and decreasing the acute medical episodes. But the current structure of healthcare still imposes an artificial divide between the two. Progress will require more than just the right devices or the best algorithms. But it can be done, especially in more integrated markets.

Richard J. Scully
Trusted Digital Transformation Leader
Yes, I am familiar…now let us pray 😉

Laurin Noel
Vice President, Business Development at Sunrise Labs, Inc.
As you may be aware, a bill has been introduced (now in subcommittee on Health) to support Telemedicine across state lines; TELEmedicine for MEDicare Act of 2013 or TELE-MED Act of 2013 – Amends title XVIII (Medicare) of the Social Security Act to permit certain Medicare providers licensed in a state to provide telemedicine services to Medicare beneficiaries in a different state.

Richard J. Scully
Trusted Digital Transformation Leader
Doc’s need reimbursement and approval to practice across state lines.

Paul M. Stein
Chief Scientist, Inventor, and Entrepreneur – Dedicated to the Treatment of Critical Unmet Medical Needs
Of course Stephen is correct. This is a no-brainer, because he is stating what the cardiac rhythm management medical device companies have been doing for the past several decades already. The true key for most “wearables” is that they are worn INSIDE the body, where much more accurate and, especially, specific data can be obtained.

Dan Stipe
Sr. Director of Industrial Design at Forma Medical Device Design
“chronic disease management is the primary opportunity we see driving healthcare transformation…. The focus is on reducing cost by taking action earlier in the process, during the earlier intervention stage or even the healthy stage.”

Absolutely. The best way to reduce health care cost is to keep people healthy longer. Rather than waiting until expensive intervention is required, the focus needs to be on prevention. Wearable technologies and data analytics are steps in the right direction — away from sick care and toward well care.

Stacy Hawkins
Direct-booking, Commission-free OTA
Great topic Joe. I just realized I didn’t include our crowdfunding campaign on my personal profile.

Joe Hage
🔥 Find me at MedicalDevicesGroup.net 🔥
Great conversation so far, folks. Thanks for the comments!

Stacy Hawkins
Direct-booking, Commission-free OTA
Joe, I absolutely agree with Stephen. In fact, his position is the underlying premise for our smart toothbrush, LifeBrush. What other item do the vast majority of people use every single day? What is more, whole organizations (including insurance companies) are making impassioned pleas to act on the research that touts a correlation between gum disease and some of our most deadly and costly chronic diseases.

The smart toothbrush is the beach front. We are developing LifeBrush, our smart toothbrush, to be the sword point to lead the charge. I haven’t watched the video of Stephen yet but now I am excitedly looking forward to doing so.

Adip Dutta
System Design Consultant
I am trying to bring together Internet connectivity for three years between multiple medical instruments, one thing I am trying without success for a decade is of course wearable Blood glucose instrument,leaving aside the Thing itself, I have successfully connected heart and couple of other things and trying to open a medical service where analytics,medical expert through Internet gives a holistic better health care. I am sure that IOE ( Internet of every…) will play a vital role along with big data analytics and this would be beneficial to the underdeveloped world also, that means in immediate future , care/preventive/supportive health care will be a explosive market.It is a rare case when buzzwords becomes a lifestyle changer.

Paul Carter
Practice Lead – Predictive Analytics and Asset Modelling at Copperleaf Technologies
Take a look at this platform that is currently being beta tested in Canada for symptom assessment and management for chronic disease:
[http://unbouncepages.com/seeyounow/|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3unbouncepages%2Ecom*3seeyounow*3/mMqA?_t=tracking_disc]

Its value proposition seems to match the statement “the focus is on reducing cost by taking action earlier in the process, during the earlier intervention stage”. It looks like the platform aims to do this by seeing trends and acting on them before they result in a trip to the emergency room.

Shelley Zhang
Engineer
Thanks to Joe for the great post, and it’s intriguing to see the modern devices is more involved with all kinds of technology and knowledge domain.

Frank Ille
HealthSaaS, Cognitive IoT Platform, designed to enable advances in digital medicine
“A great smartphone app that tracks sleep patterns and activity levels doesn’t necessarily help me to improve my health.”

The quote above is blanket statement and not necessarily true.

The app alone may not help a patient or clinician but when sleep data is correlated with other patient driven data including current disease states, medications, exercise, etc. we have an opportunity to greatly improve a patient’s health and reduce costs.

Bo has some very valid thoughts in his post.

Based on my experience at HealthSaaS it is the thousands of disconnected data silo’s and lack of a payer reimbursement model that is significantly hindering the adoption of IoT for healthcare.

Burrell (Bo) Clawson
I research patents & design products to get a patented competitive position: Over 30 patents.
With somewhere between 120-145 million US adults with chronic disease (CDC or Milken Inst), consuming 50% of a hospital’s costs, it is simply a no-brainer that targeting chronic illness both before and after it appears is crucial to controlling costs.

Targeting people with pre-chronic symptoms is an obvious winner. Right now, though, there is little incentive for people to switch habits, diets, add medications, or embark on light aerobics or other exercise.

If a system is based on incentives, like paying much higher for health insurance because you have markers for impending chronic illness, that makes logical sense. But in today’s world that would be “penalizing people” which is considered discriminatory in the WDC world of politics. Insurance at Lloyds, founded for shipping insurance, was a risk payment based on soundness of the ship and officers, based on expected losses, so it is not really “insurance” anymore.

Psychology and pressure from multiple sources must be used to get people involved with their long term health. My guess is mobile devices will help. Already, some doctors are refusing to take patients who don’t stop smoking & that is one level of pressure. Companies are doing likewise with employees.

Reminders on Post-It notes are endemic. Reminders on the body are just coming to market. Mobile worn devices will be able to start to warn people of blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar levels and more, often a decade or more before it becomes critical.

Personal monitoring may be required by insurance/healthcare providers, so corrections can be made. It will take a long term effort by everyone in healthcare to make this happen.

Cheryl Casale
Transformation Ambassador leading innovation in Healthcare/Life Sciences | Regulatory SME | Consumer Outcomes Advocate
This is the next frontier. Advancing treatment and monitoring of chronic diseases will provide positive patient outcomes by decreasing ADRs and AEs. Many companies have developed apps and pt engagement tools which us a great start. Getting patients to engage will advance pt compliance.

Thanks Joe for the great post!

Eric Harness
Founder / President — Neuro/Adaptive Exercise and Performance Consultant
I would have to respectfully disagree with Stephen Pierce on this: “A great smartphone app that tracks sleep patterns and activity levels doesn’t necessarily help me to improve my health.” We are learning that sleep plays an important role in pain management, less sleep can lead to more pain and vis versa. Knowing how much sleep and the quality of that sleep one gets might allow chronic pain sufferers to better prioritize their sleep/wake cycle to help manage their condition.

[http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20121130/more-sleep-less-pain?page=2|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3www%2Ewebmd%2Ecom*3pain-management*3news*320121130*3more-sleep-less-pain%3Fpage%3D2/yeMl?_t=tracking_disc]
[http://sleepfoundation.org/media-center/press-release/2015-sleep-america-poll|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3sleepfoundation%2Eorg*3media-center*3press-release*32015-sleep-america-poll/iCST?_t=tracking_disc]

I would also argue that understanding your activity levels would help to decrease your chance of developing a chronic disease. Many people have a false impression of the amount of activity/calories burned during a typical day.

We need to stop being a society/medical community that reacts to chronic disease and become proactive. Insurance should be looking at paying for preventative measures such as wearable devices and gym memberships, as opposed to waiting to pay for the $250,000+ heart operation.