Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, MA, MHSA, is a health economist and management consultant who advises organizations on the intersection of health, technology and people.
She's the founder of THINK-Health and author of the Health Populi blog, which she launched in 2007. Sarasohn-Kahn is also a member of the HIMSS mHealth Committee and serves on the advisory boards of the CAQH’s U.S. Health Efficiency Index, Partner's Healthcare's Center for Connected Health Symposium, the Health 2.0 Conference and WEGO Health.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. That peoples’ mobile phones are their wellness channels, as Dr. John Mattison of Kaiser has said, and self-tracking has begun to get traction for health among health-conscious consumers.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. Tracking steps via our phones, and not “wearables.”
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. The clinical diagnostics tools that are emerging for providers to become truly mobile are very exciting because they can scale the clinician and turbocharge workflow, productivity and, ultimately, access for more patient care.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. Wearables that only perform one function (such as step-tracking or heart-rate function) won’t be useful as more sensors can be on a single device for multiple functions.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend has surprised you the most, either with its success or its failure?
A. What’s disappointed me most in the failure column is the chasm that remains between consumers and providers in shared decision-making through mHealth and personal health IT. Nine in 10 consumers in the U.S. seek a role in sharing decisions with physicians, but the provider side just isn’t embracing that opportunity.
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. The biggest concern I have is third-party access to peoples’ personal health data through data brokers and social network “scraping.” As much as half of peoples’ health data flows in the U.S. fall outside of HIPAA-covered entities, based on important research by Latanya Sweeney at the Harvard Privacy Project. This is concerning due to unintended uses that could impact, say, peoples’ credit scores, job applications and redlining for mortgages, among many other scenarios that fall into the civil rights bailiwick.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" – consumers, providers or some other party?
A. Consumers are already far ahead of providers in adopting mHealth in their daily lives. As providers take on more value-based care accounting for health outcomes and patient satisfaction, coupled with consumers enrolling in high-deductible health plans with HSAs, more market behavior will come to healthcare, which would incentivize providers to “prescribe” and recommend patients to use various remote monitoring and self-tracking tools.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I’m working across the health and healthcare ecosystem to connect the dots between peoples’ self-care (through OTCs, personal health IT tools, food/nutrition and financial wellness) and the healthcare system. Until people, consumers and caregivers all take on more Health DIY and self-care, we can’t bend that cost-curve and drive optimal outcomes. That’s my focus.
