ATA trend #1: Is a sustainable RPM infrastructure fact or fiction?
Guest columnist Dr Vikrum (Sunny) Malhotra attended ATA 2015 last week. This is the first of three articles on his observations on trends and companies to watch.
The advancement of remote patient monitoring is a visible trend from the American Telemedicine Association’s 2015 meeting, with care moving from the doctor’s office and being shifted to the patient’s home. A more diverse range of data is being collected for patients to facilitate more informed decision making at the patient visit and after the patient is away from the practice. As information is being collected and monitored on a more comprehensive basis, we have seen creative modalities to view a broad array of data points that would typically have been collected in a doctor’s office with the hopes of early diagnosis and preventive care, versus reactive care.
Patient autonomy has now come to the forefront and network infrastructure is being built to support that shift. Wearables, implantables and home based lab/ urine diagnostic kits are becoming smaller, cheaper, less invasive, wireless and cloud-based so that patients can be monitored without interfering in day to day living. (more…)
Simplifying engagement in diabetes management
FCC sharply elbows up to the mHealth regulatory table
That other three-letter agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has shown a distinctly competitive face versus the FDA on Federal healthcare tech policy over the past three years and more, has formed–drum roll–a task force to examine adoption of wireless technologies by health care organizations. Connect2HealthFCC will “identify regulatory barriers and incentives to expand the use of wireless health technologies; and strengthen partnerships with stakeholders in the telehealth and mobile health industries.” If this an accurate statement of the task force’s purpose, the parade not only has gone by, but it’s also three counties away. Yet going back in our files, this Editor notes that the FCC has vigorously fenced not only with the FDA, but also with HHS, NIH, NIST and Congress for its place in the Federal HIT regulatory firmament. With issues such as ‘net neutrality’, wireless bandwidth and rural broadband, the FCC has a heaping healthcare helping on its plate just in assuring national access and removing conflicts in frequency demands by devices. However, the task force is headed by Michele Ellison, lately the FCC’s top regulatory enforcer with, as The Hill notes, 6,000 actions under her belt. In Foggy Bottom, things are never what they seem. iHealthBeat
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