Andrew Watson, MD, is Chief Medical Information Officer of the International and Commercial Services division of UPMC, co-manager of its UPMC Global Care program and medical director of both UPMC Telemedicine and the Center for Connected Medicine, the largest collaborative briefing center in the United States. A fourth-generation surgeon and faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, he's a practicing surgeon in the Division of Colorectal Surgery, a board member of the American Telemedicine Association and a past winner of the Healthcare IT News' H.I.T Men and Women Award.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. The appeal to consumers will drive adoption over the coming years – this is an organic basis for support and one that is being driven by the consumer electronics market.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. Lifestyle monitoring will become most common in the next five years – with the associated list of features, i.e. stress management, smoking cessation, nutritional advice, and so on.
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. The most cutting edge application is the Apple Health app – it is easy to use, works, is native to the OS and has massive deployment.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. It is hard to predict which tools will fade, but most likely non-integrated activity trackers will fade as phones and watches with dual functionality come into play.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend has surprised you the most, either with its success or its failure?
A. The rise of remote monitoring and its promise is most engaging and valuable for our future – especially for care management and cost avoidance.
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. I do fear mHealth will not be embraced quickly enough by payers for value-based reimbursement. This would significantly impair development of this critical channel.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" – consumers, providers or some other party?
A. The consumers will push this to the next level.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. UPMC is investigating a comprehensive remote monitoring program.
Previous installments in our mHealth masters series:
A call for EHR providers to catch up
Why telehealth has a brighter future than apps
Forget 'disruptive,' focus on 'collaborative'
