Yulun Wang, PhD, is the president-elect of the American Telemedicine Association and chairman and CEO of InTouch Health, which he founded in 2002. He launched his career with the founding of Computer Motion, where he created AESOP, the first FDA-cleared surgical robot. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, he is the author of more than 50 publications and 100 registered patents and a member of the University of California, Santa Barbara's Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and Advisory Board and the Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian Board of Directors.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. mHealth will enable access to our healthcare system that was previously not possible. Through mobile devices, patients will be able to access care and healthcare professionals will be able to access patient information and patients. This eliminates the barrier of geographic distance, enabling a more frictionless healthcare delivery system with improved efficiency and cost.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. Mobile devices and software that turn these mobile devices into healthcare tools (reasons stated above) will be ubiquitous in the next five years.
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. The telemedicine healthcare delivery network that we (i.e. InTouch Health) have developed is clearly cutting-edge and a positive disruptor for our healthcare system. From my iPhone, right now, a physician can deliver patient care into any of over 1,000 hospital locations, both domestic and international. The evolution of this concept is to introduce "big data" into the system. That information can be used to 1) enable automatic healthcare delivery actions to take place, and/or 2) enable healthcare professionals to always have state-of-the-art best practices available to them.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. Many different business models are being developed, some of which will succeed and some of which will fail. One of the overriding questions is, "Who's willing to pay for what?" For example, will patients be willing to pay out-of-pocket for more convenience? Or will healthcare insurance companies be willing to pay for healthy activities?
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. My biggest fear is that organizations will jump into the healthcare space with solution offerings that are not well thought through and which can put patients' lives and privacy in danger. And that these actions will taint the entire industry and consequently slow positive progress.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" - consumers, providers or some other party?
A. mHealth is going to be pushed by consumers, providers and payers, since all three constituents have the opportunity to gain with this new technology. mHealth has the ability to improve access to high-quality care, and to do so at a lower cost.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I'm working on building a telemedicine platform that can scale across all of the patient acuity levels and geographic locations where patients reside, such that healthcare providers can manage the risk of an entire population by providing timely, best-practice care to patients cost-effectively.
