New technology entering the market has the potential to overhaul the healthcare system via increases in home-based patient monitoring.
Speaking at a recent New York Academy of Sciences conference on mHealth and wearable devices, John Mastrototaro, vice president of informatics at device company Medtronic, shared his outlook on how he envisions remote monitoring and sensing will be key to a less-expensive healthcare system.
Aggregating relevant data from a large number of people and devices will hopefully improve understanding of patient outcomes as well as the best treatment options for individual patients. These changes will decrease healthcare costs by:
- Placing greater focus on preventative care to avoid costly emergency hospital trips
- Incorporating physician feedback from remote monitoring patients’ data via a dashboard
- Empowering the tech support staff to intervene if patients’ metrics appear dangerous
- Cardiocom: remotely manages heart patients’ data and flags dangerous readings
- MiniMed: monitors child diabetes patients in real time and texts caregivers if blood sugar is too low
- Zephyr: variety of products with sensors to monitor health outputs and allow patients a more active role in their healthcare
- Biotronic: remote monitoring patients using implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) devices
- AliveCor: allows on-demand ECGs for heart patients via a device connected to a smartphone or tablet
Wearable devices and technology that use remote monitoring can also help patients improve their quality of life by reducing the number of trips to doctors offices.
Of course, these devices and others create various new data sources that have an effect across the care continuum both pre- and post-approval of a new therapy. If these devices are going to be incorporated into clinical research, it’s vital to understand the connection in the life sciences industry of these two typically disparate worlds (operationally anyways).