Can health technologies transform health care?
In many ways, the business world knows more about our patients than we do as health care providers. Businesses know what kind of food their customers buy, how often they fill their prescriptions, their spending patterns, and can often even predict what they will need based on analyzing this data.
Why is it that the business world has more data and information on the intimate details of our patients’ daily lives (a.k.a. their customers) than we do as health care providers?
Jonathan Bonnet, M.D.; Aaron George, DO; Mo Shahsahebi, M.D., and myself, all from the Department of Community and Family Medicine, have partnered with Ryan Shaw, Ph.D., RN, from the Duke University School of Nursing to publish our perspective reflecting our vision of how new health technologies, especially smartphones and medical sensor devices, can transform how we practice primary care medicine, in an article titled “Mobile Health Technology for Personalized Primary Care Medicine” in the American Journal of Medicine.
Currently, primary care is delivered in a series of episodes rather than as a continuum. Patients make serial visits to a clinic or hospital, and health care providers collect discrete and isolated biophysical and behavioral health data. These single data points, collected where patients spend little “life” time, are compared to the patient’s history and analyzed to make presumptive diagnoses and care recommendations.
This model neglects significant amounts of potentially meaningful data from patients’ daily lives and results in less informed treatment and scheduling of follow-up visits. Lack of meaningful data further blinds providers to patients’ health outside of the clinic and can contribute to unnecessary emergency department visits and hospitalizations, and ultimately higher health care costs.
Mobile devices, notably smartphones and other wearable sensors, have the potential to collect this real time health data. This data can be collected from the patient directly as well as indirectly from his/her family or care takers.
This has the potential to yield new insight into disease processes through continuous streams of data that can enhance our understanding of the longitudinal effects of care delivery, medications and health behaviors to reduce health risks and optimize health outcomes.
You can’t get too far these days without hearing about the next wonderful fitness or wellness technological device that promises to transform your health or manage your chronic disease. The truth is that this revolution in health technology does have the potential to transform the way health care is delivered.
However, challenges remain regarding data presentation, validity, collection, security and regulations that will each need to be addressed. Further, new models of care delivery will need to be created that will incorporate, interpret and analyze abundant real-time data from patients. These technologies will reflect the unique environment patients reside in, taking into account the different exposures, stressors and influences on their disease state, and will play a vital role in allowing health care providers to truly understand what happens in their patients’ everyday lives.
While the world of business continues to track their customers, the health care community must strive for innovative ways to monitor and manage patients for the best health outcome and happiness.
Farhad Modarai is a second-year resident with the Duke Family Medicine Residency Program. Email farhad.modarai@duke.edu with questions.
Editor’s note: Duke Family Medicine residents guest blog the second Friday of every month.