To Douglas Wood, MD, mHealth works when it pays attention to what the patient wants and needs. And right now, healthcare providers aren't listening.

Wood, medical director at the Mayo Clinic's Center for Innovation, says providers traditionally have managed their patients by telling them to "do things we want people to do," rather than understanding what patients want. But that authoritative approach is turning people off, and in this age of consumer-facing and value-based healthcare, that means providers are missing out on opportunities to improve their practice.

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Wood, the subject of an executive spotlight at this year's mHealth Summit, says that approach by providers widens the disconnect with patients – even in mHealth, often seen as the bridge over that gap and the key to solving healthcare's woes. Too many solutions, he says, "create lots of measures that aren't really important to people in their everyday lives," and end up wasting everyone's time and effort. That's why mHealth isn't catching on as well or as quickly as it should.

It all begins, he says, with understanding the patient experience.

"We've created these mobile health solutions that we think people will use without really understanding what people really need," he says. For example, he notes there are hundreds of diabetes apps now on the market, but few that are actually working. That's because developers and doctors are thinking about people as diabetics, rather than as people living with diabetes.

Wood says healthcare needs to "fundamentally understand what people need and then create solutions that help them." That means seeing the patient as a collaborator, or as an expert on their own health. "People know a lot about their own health and what they want to do," he adds. "If we just let them, they'll do well."

Aside from understanding the patient experience, Wood says healthcare also needs to make some radical changes in how providers are paid. The traditional structure is to pay doctors for volume, and that's measured by documentation. In other words, doctors are paid to use technology and to measure and report things, so they're adding as many tests and touchpoints as they think they need.

But mHealth, when properly used, reduces those clinical interventions, Wood says, and creates an ongoing relationship between providers and patients that allows for care management. In that sense, he says, doctors should be reimbursed for "normal care," not the number of visits, tests and exams they can schedule. And the measurements of care, taken from patient-reported data and mobile devices as well as the provider, should help both patient and provider develop a plan for health, not healthcare.

mHealth "is as tool for a different kind of medical practice, a participatory kind  … rather than the authoritarian kind that has been in place for decades," Wood says.

And if that's to be the healthcare system of the future, it will require some pretty big changes.

Wood will take the stage at the mHealth Summit for an executive spotlight at 10:05 a.m. Monday, Nov. 9, in Potomac Ballroom AB at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, just outside Washington D.C.. For more information on the mHealth Summit, the HIMSS Connected Health Conference or the co-located CyberSecurity Summit and Population Health Summit, visit here.