Joanne Rohde is CEO and founder of Axial Exchange, a developer of patient engagement solutions for the healthcare space. A 30-year veteran in the industry, she was the former COO and director of health IT strategy at Red Hat and CIO of UBS Investment Banking IT.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. The overall shift in how hospitals and physicians get paid is what will drive mHealth adoption. Doctors are realizing that they need to do more than ever before to keep patients engaged, and patients are realizing they need to take a more active role in their own health and wellness. The key to patient engagement is empowering patients to manage their own health — between doctor visits — through mobile technology, such as apps. Engaged patients not only have better outcomes, they are better business.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. Apple’s recent HealthKit announcement is just the tip of the iceberg. Wearable technology, like Fitbit, wireless scales, sleep monitors, blood pressure cuffs and other biometric devices that are currently popular with the wellness crowd, will start to gain traction with those who watch chronic conditions. For example, a Mayo Clinic study showed that a 90-day program of managing key personal data through smartphones led to a 40 percent reduction in cardiac readmissions and ER visits after stent surgery. Where Mayo Clinic leads, others follow.
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. We are seeing some initial progress in using smartphones and their cases to measure medical conditions that previously required specialized equipment. For example, imagine being able to do an electrocardiogram (ECG) from anywhere by using your smartphone. An FDA-approved device called AliveCor is making this happen. Another device called Qlab (Qloudlab) will enable users to do a blood test to check their glucose level from virtually anywhere. It’s not yet FDA-approved, but it should be soon.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. Patient portals as a stand-alone application — as they address part, but not the core, of what patients need. They need to be integrated with education, patient monitoring, behavior modification and social and support groups to make them relevant to the patient population.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend has surprised you the most, either with its success or its failure?
A. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how rapidly the general public would pick up Fitbit and other activity trackers. I think it’s a message for the healthcare practitioners that people are saying that they want to understand more about themselves and be more active. According to Pew Research, 46 percent of trackers say this activity has changed their overall approach to maintaining their health or the health of someone for whom they provide care. That is pretty amazing.
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. Healthcare institutions need help understanding how to adapt to this new healthcare world. The shift in the healthcare system has forced provider organizations to do things they haven’t done before — like become payers themselves or work closely with the payers. Organizations need to recruit populations, like local employers, and different workers, like clinically schooled case managers. I fear that there is so much change going on in the way the healthcare industry works, and this, coupled with new requirements and regulations, is a lot for healthcare organizations and the providers themselves to keep up with.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" – consumers, providers or some other party?
A. Ultimately, both patients and providers will need to collaborate to make mHealth successful in the long-term. The independent physician holds the keys to helping chronic patients control their illness, but patients have to realize that their health is ultimately their responsibility. The doctor is the expert consultant, but patients have to bring him/her the right information. Mobile apps and wearable technology enable this.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. Axial Exchange is just at the beginning of what we can do to improve the patient-doctor experience. Our current area of focus is on the rapid advances of wearable devices. We want patients to understand their own health patterns and to securely share that key biometric information with their physicians so that each appointment can be fact-based, not “recall” based.
Next, Axial is going to focus on real-time case management. This could give providers the ability to get in touch with a recently released cardiac patient precisely when they are at the most risk — instead of waiting for a crisis that lands him or her back in the hospital. These types of timely, specific interventions can become a reality with the integration of mobile applications, such as Axial’s.
