There are staggering statistics around the projected shortfall of healthcare providers (doctors and nurses, etc) that will enter the US labor market over the next 10-15 years. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the predicted deficit is in the hundreds of thousands. On the flip side, as we realize this shortage, more and more seniors will enter the market each year who require some type of specialized healthcare. Specifically, predictions are that by 2015, we’ll see 80 million more of these seniors, largely due to the impact of baby-boomers and various other demographic influences.
How we care for this future population is another story.
Using the current care delivery model, we spend a good portion of a provider’s time directly interacting with a patient. This can take the form of a nurse calling a patient on the phone and asking a series of questions to a doctor interacting first hand with a patient in their office. This human-intensive model is expensive, often inefficient and requires the personal attention that the resource predictions mentioned above won’t be able to support.
This can become an interesting story if the efforts of a number of innovative home healthcare and medical device companies have their way.
BodyMedia
BodyMedia designs and builds ‘wearable’ devices that collect, process and present information about an individual’s health and daily routine outside of a clinical setting. Applications for these devices are around weight management, fitness, disease management and research. Imagine being able to “watch” a patient from afar and based on observations provide input into and feedback on their daily activities to improve their plan of care’s effectiveness.
Card Guard
Card Guard specializes in telehealth systems and monitoring services for high-risk and chronically ill patients, including ordinary consumers of health products. Take a look at one of their more interesting offerings that involves the television: Card Guard’s T-Health iTV Healthcare System represents the latest in interactive digital TV, dedicated software and easy-to-use medical accessories for screening, monitoring, diagnosing and managing general consumer health, fitness and illness.
T-Health iTV Monitoring Service features:
- Vital signs and symptoms monitoring
- Clinical advice and treatment
- Educational provision
- One on One” Interaction
There have been medical devices assisting us in home healthcare for years – so what makes today’s offerings different? Besides the fundamental advances in technology such as miniaturization, improvements in ergonomics and smarter devices the primary difference is around Internet-connected systems and devices that allow for more timely and relevant data collection, retrieval and analysis.
Another key innovation to notice here is around the ‘personalization’ of the technology and the proximity of the device to the patient. In this case, the ‘wearability’ of devices can more easily permit a patient to be mobile while receiving care. Whether around the house or around the block, different care management plans can be formulated based on the severity of need and the requirements that dictate the individual’s location.
From a business perspective, there’s another dimension - this model scales. You can now automate a broader array of basic tasks that are routine elements of a care management plan. Saves time, resources, people, money. If you can care for or monitor more patients, you can scale the model upward to include larger paying populations in your business plan or target market. If you can leverage a broader and ‘smarter’ array of monitoring products, the model scales outward to increase the breadth of automated services you offer in the home, the office or at the store without increasing the complexity of the data collection process.
For example, imagine of the following scenario:
You wake up in the morning. While you were sleeping, your wearable device collected information about how you slept, your heart rate, respiratory rate and various data points relative to your galvanic skin response. You walk in the bathroom, step on the scale and your weight, heart rate and other indicators are correlated against your last 8 or so hours of diagnostics and a new daily activity regimen is forwarded over your home network to your printer in the kitchen, complete with recommended diet for the day and a note telling you that your caregiver will call you at 3PM to check up on you. All done automatically, connected, secure, and inexpensively – we hope of course.
Where is this heading?
As more and more companies take part in the care management process and more patients (consumers) are placed under their care, new business models will evolve around how to get more into the patients home - or onto their body. There may be less barriers to adoption if the technology is subsidized by the organization managing their care and there may be more services to introduce if overall costs are reduced as a result of the innovation.
