Event Review – HIMSS New England Chapter: Mobile Health: Real World Lessons
Last night, my colleagues and I attended a New England HIMSS event in Wellesley, MA covering Mobile Health. After battling through brutal traffic commuting from Boston to Wellesley during rush hour, we arrived and were all equally impressed with the night’s speaker - Robert Havasy, Business Analyst at the Center for Connected Health in Massachusetts. I particularly liked the presentation technology used for his pitch – Prezi - a web-based presentation application and storytelling tool that uses a single canvas instead of traditional slides.
Some key takeaways from the presentation:
- Will the FDA regulate smart phones or mobile devices and treat them as medical devices?
- Patients are unencumbered by the regulatory process
- Two focus areas for mobile health technology
- Capturing Data – vitals, blood sugar, etc
- Coaching – guiding patients to make better choices
- Sunscreen adherence using mobile technology
- Electronic monitor used to accurately measure usage of sunscreen
- Reminder texts sent to mobile phone
- After six weeks adherence rates for the reminder group were almost double that of the control group who did not receive reminder texts: 56 versus 30 percent.
- Utilizing text messaging to influence patient behavior -Center for Connected Health – project in Lynn, MA.
- Two areas of focus: Opiate addiction and Teenage pregnancy
- Localization is important – mention people by places and name
- Who the message was from (especially doctor) meant more to patients that if it were personally addressed to them
- Barrier to participation – cost – patients were afraid they would have to pay for the additional text messages
- Unleash the nurses – nurse evangelist sells benefits to non-physician staff
- Offset workflow changes in offices – take administration off of practice
- Sustainable reimbursement structure – engage carriers – CMS – insurers – alternative quality contracts
- Northeastern University, working in collaboration with industry players, announced an incubator program for mobile health technologies. Contact Dan Feinberg, Director, Graduate Health Informatics Program at Northeastern University, President at New England Chapter of HIMSS, for more information
