mobihealthnews

In a wide-ranging interview with Mobihealthnews, the Center for Connected Health’s Founder and Director Dr. Joseph Kvedar recently discussed the center’s various wireless health programs, belief in text messages for healthcare, assessment of the likely early adopters of wireless health services and the need to not lose sight of the challenges facing this emerging industry.

Mobihealthnews: While many readers may already be familiar with the Center for Connected Health at Partners, can you give a brief overview of the Center’s work and raison d’etre?

Kvedar: Sure, our goal is to provide care to patients where the patient is and when the patient needs it, which is to say: outside of traditional care settings like at work or in the home place. This is very consistent with the vision of mobile applications since they too follow the patient. We also have a second goal, which is to give the patient or the consumer the tools that they can use to be their own provider whenever possible. They are a very complementary set of goals.

To accomplish these goals, we have four design principles that we apply:

The first is accurate collection of data (usually physiological information): blood pressure, glucose, step counts, that kind of thing. The second principle is sharing that information back with you in a way that is meaningful to you in the context of your illness. The third component is coaching and the term coaching is very broad to us. It could include sending a reminder to a person or contact with a human being. The idea is you take that behavioral and physiologic data and arm a coach with the same data you are giving the patient and it turns out to be very powerful. The fourth is connecting that information to a healthcare provider when one is needed.

We have programs in a number of chronic illnesses: heart failure is our most advanced program. For diabetes we have an up and coming, growing program. We have done a lot of interesting things with high blood pressure, both in terms of our use as a provider but also in terms of in the market place as an employee benefit. We have a program up and coming in activity monitoring and weight control. Down the road we will be working on mental health, depression and so forth.

That’s a very quick fly by of what we do.

Are these programs still pilots in the development phase or are they commercially launched? Can you drill down on some of these programs and how far along they are? Keep reading>>