It is an exciting time to be in the healthcare industry, especially considering the impact technological advancements in digital health have had on healthcare. However, though strides are being made, digital health innovation is still limited today by its inability to integrate data collected outside of the hospital or clinical setting back to the current health IT infrastructure. This is according to Ryan Beckland, co-founder and CEO of Validic, the industry's leading cloud-based digital health platform. Validic connects mobile health and in-home medical devices, fitness and clinical wearables, and consumer wellness applications to healthcare organizations. Their customers include health IT vendors, health information systems, hospital systems, wellness companies and pharmaceutical companies. Beckland, who leads Validic with a vision to improve overall population health by providing healthcare companies with viable, actionable health data, discusses how integration and interoperability are the keys to realizing the full potential of digital health for improving healthcare outcomes and reducing costs.
Q: What is going on in the market for Digital Health?
A: We're seeing innovation all around us, in the form of wearables and sensors, clinical and in-home devices, and health and wellness applications – the digital health ecosystem is expanding daily. These devices are rapidly becoming much smarter and much less expensive. We are seeing digital health devices and applications being implemented at scale throughout health systems, hospitals, wellness programs, clinical trials and employer groups. Health tracking and engagement has been and continues to be fully ingrained in the daily activities of a wide spectrum of patients, from the healthy and athletic to the overweight and chronically or acutely-ill. Leaders in healthcare innovation are using these mobile health technologies to better engage their populations, improve patient outcomes and reduce overall spending. More than ever, healthcare companies need to keep pace with digital health innovation. At Validic, we help those companies access their patients' data quickly and securely, and remove all of the pain and challenges with building and maintaining device integrations.
Q: What role does Validic play in this digital health ecosystem?
A: Healthcare and wellness organizations are looking for a simple way to access and integrate mobile health data into their systems. Validic delivers standardized, secure and actionable patient data to healthcare portals, systems, apps, records and platforms. Our customers use that data to gain better insights into care treatment plans, monitor patient engagement behavior, improve financial management of their patient populations and provide better connectivity across the entire continuum of care. Essentially, Validic acts as the "glue" that connects mobile health apps and devices to the healthcare system.
Without Validic, healthcare companies would have to build one-off integrations to each of the applications and devices they want to support. Given the pace of innovation in mobile health, this is a major challenge that is only going to get more difficult and complicated over time. Without Validic, these companies would also have to build massively scalable server architecture to support millions of data points. Validic processed over one billion data calls in the last 30 days alone. We save our customers from having to build and maintain that architecture. Validic also standardizes and normalizes the data, so that we can add new devices without our customers having to do any additional work. Essentially, we future-proof and safeguard our customers in an environment where hundreds of new devices are coming to market each month. With Validic, all of the technical and market challenges are handled, quickly and efficiently. Healthcare companies are then able to focus on utilizing their patient's health data to accelerate their strategic health and wellness objectives.
Q: What should healthcare companies do to accelerate their digital health strategies?
A: We work with hospitals, payers, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare IT vendors and wellness companies. Many of our clients have told us that they tried to handle mobile health device and app integrations on their own before coming to us. They did not anticipate the challenges associated with connecting their platforms to all of the devices and apps they needed, and all of the maintenance required to maintain and update these connections. This type of work just is not their core focus. They do not want to spend their valuable financial and technical resources on trying to keep up with the speed of change in healthcare technology. At Validic, we work closely with our clients to ensure they get the individual patient data they need quickly and easily, so they do not have to worry about making individual, one-off connections to each of these different devices, applications and developer kits. Validic offers healthcare organizations a single connection point for patient health data, which is an efficient and quick way to advance a digital health strategy.
Q: What do all of the consumer entrants mean for digital health and healthcare?
A: We are seeing a surge in innovation with the recent swell of large consumer electronic companies entering the market bringing more devices, applications, wearables and developer kits. We are thrilled about what these consumer electronic entrants mean for digital health, and the subsequent impact digital health will have on healthcare. Their presence will help accelerate innovation and consumer adoption of digital health technologies, which is good for the industry as a whole.
These large consumer electronics companies will be creating more technology, more users and more patient data. All of this really fuels the value of Validic in this digital health ecosystem, and the role we play between our clients and integrations. We continue to be a device and platform agnostic solution, working with all varieties of standards and platforms. Our clients want this, and we know this is how Validic can help play a role in transforming healthcare.
