Kaiser's Vision of How Mobile Monitoring Will Transform the Healthcare Industry

Famed environmentalist David Brower once said that: "all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent." While Brower did not have medical technology in mind when making that statement, some of the most pressing problems in healthcare are not strictly technological in nature.

Take healthcare costs as an example. While some have linked U.S. technology spending, there are a lot of factors that push costs up, ranging from the lack of transparency to the fee-for-service model.

Yan Chow, MD, director of Kaiser Permanente's Innovation and Advanced Technology Group, invokes Brower's quote in the context of healthcare technology to illustrate this point. For decades, proponents of telemedicine have enthusiastically proclaimed technology's potential to rein in costs and improve care delivery. While it may be beginning to make good on its promises, significant barriers still exist including clinicians' hesitance to change their workflow to the lack of reimbursement in telehealth. Another factor is the fact that telehealth is not the standard of care and therefore more likely to lead to litigation when problems arise.

With the proper framework in place, however, telehealth and mobile technology have enormous potential to redefine healthcare, making it more efficient and effective. In many ways, there's no other option but to embrace it, as megatrends such as the shortage of clinicians and the growing pool of patients will make the already strained care model even more untenable.

So what does the future look like? For one thing, IT will play an ever-more important role in healthcare, and for the past 15 years, Chow has been involved in the healthcare IT space. Since 2006, he has been actively been working to foresee the future of healthcare and help use technology to improve care delivery. His team has looked at more than 1500 technologies, ranging from everything from robotics, Big Data analytics, virtual reality, social media, genomics, imaging technologies--all of which have an IT component.

Chow is working with Kaiser, the nation's largest integrated not-for-profit healthcare network, to reboot how healthcare is delivered and explore new ways to use technology to address vexing healthcare problems. To that end, Kaiser launched the Garfield Innovation Center in 2006, where it is explores emerging technologies. The 37,000-sq-ft facility represents a $51-billion investment in the future, complete with patient rooms, operating rooms, and nursing stations. Having a test facility, such as the Garfield Innovation Center, where new technologies can be field tested, is common in other industries but not so in healthcare. This lack of real-world testing ultimately drives overall costs up, Chow says.

In 2012, Kaiser granted its 9 million members access to its EHR records, the largest such system the world, via an app. The app has been downloaded more than 600,000 times.

Kaiser share a vision of what mobile monitoring technology might look like in the not-too-distant future in a video (embedded below), which shows how healthcare data can be shared across mobile devices. In a clinical environment, algorithms could be used to help help hospitals manage staffing levels and prepare for incoming patients.  

Brian Buntz is the editor-in-chief of MPMN and Qmed. Follow him on Twitter at @brian_buntz.