Here's an important think piece about the future of health wearables: Is the Healthcare Industry Ready to Embrace a Consumer Wearable Device Revolution). It approaches the topic from the perspective of the steps that healthcare executives need to take to more fully embrace and adapt to this new technology. Below is an excerpt from it:
There are at least two categories of...[wearable health] devices in existence today that relate to healthcare. One type is a consumer wearable, such as a fitness tracker or a smartwatch that has been amended with health tracking features largely controlled by a device manufacturer. Another type is a patch, a device that can be attached to various parts of the human body to collect designated information, typically vital signs. One challenge of consumer wearables is that the devices are limited in disease-specific algorithm development on an open source platform offering limitless innovation opportunities aimed specifically at patient care. For the monitoring body patches, they face the issue of being costly disposable hardware that is required to transmit data to a nearby mobile device that needs to remain within a close range.
All of these devices...also face security and privacy scrutiny, including having to comply with HIPAA and FDA Part 11 privacy regulations that impact not just the device but also the data it carries and how that data is being transmitted....Even the promise of discharging a patient who is using a wearable device that can transmit basic vitals data is huge progress compared to a weekly home health nurse who visits a patient and documents his or her condition, but is often too late to take a decisive medical action before the patient’s condition deteriorates. Even with the clear benefits of wearables, hospitals and medical groups are not currently operationally structured to receive, observe and process the constant stream of patient-reported data made by wearable devices....[T]he real future of wearables is in what happens in the background after the data is generated and transmitted. The biggest winners will be those who are able to incorporate these new streams of patient data into comprehensive predictive patient care engines that are able to detect, categorize and act upon risk variables.
I want to emphasize two points from the article. The first is that wearable patches are part of the wearable market in addition to fitness trackers and will play an important role in the care of hospital patients, particularly post-discharge. Although expensive, they enable hospital-based personnel to monitor vital signs and other parameters of patents' status post-discharge. They will enable earlier discharge of patients or can be deployed in "hospital at home" scenarios (see: Some Details about Hospital-at-Home (HaH) Services for Selected ER Patients; Reducing the Cost of Care; Provide Home Care for Sicker Patients with Remote Monitoring).
One important point in this discussion regarding wearable patches is how the hospitals will be reimbursed for the cost of such devices. The second point is how hospital employees will capture and analyze the data generated by the patches. I can't articulate this latter idea better than was expressed in the excerpt above: The biggest winners will be those who are able to incorporate these new streams of patient data into comprehensive predictive patient care engines that are able to detect, categorize and act upon risk variables.
Comments