Medical Device News and Insights

MDCI Attends Connected Health Symposium

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | Industry News and Innovations | No Comments

On October 21-22, 2009, I attended the 6th annual Connected Health Symposium in Boston. Considering the current debates over health care reform, universal coverage, and comparative effectiveness initiatives, the timing of this meeting was ideal. The sponsor of the symposium, the Center for Connected Health, a division of the Partners HealthCare system and an active member of the American Telemedicine Association works with Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospitals in the Boston area.  This organization promotes the development of communications technology and online resources to improve access to, and the quality of, patient care.

What is Connected Health?
The term “connected health” indicates a wide range of technological solutions to bring medical care to “where the patient is”.  Their focus is to increasingly engage patients in their own health care and wellness through technology driven by the convergence of online consults, improved wireless platforms, and remote monitoring medical devices.

The Connected Health attendees agree that the adoption of e-health will be difficult. The major challenges are physician resistance and payor/insurer reimbursement hurdles.  As supporters of telemedicine, the members feel that the patients themselves will be very eager for, and capable of managing these systems.  Although it is agreed that more effectiveness studies and cost analyses need to be done, the connected health proponents cite numerous references in support of e-health.  For example, they state that the rapidly growing diabetes arena will benefit from the “connected health” approach, both from a patient compliance and a cost containment perspective.

All presenters appeared to agree that in order for this approach to take off, it must be easy to use and cost-effective, doctors must be paid based upon outcomes rather than on the number of services/procedures performed, and, not insignificantly, patients must be accountable for their health (or adequately incentivized or penalized). The topic of behavioral medicine spawned lively debate over the effectiveness, value, and ethics, of using behavioral ‘nudges’ to drive changes in patients’ actions, and presumably their health outcomes.

How Will Connected Health Be Regulated?
An important issue centers on the fact that medical devices are a regulated industry. Obtaining FDA clearance for a medical device often means validating its performance on a variety of systems, in different environments, or with various connected platforms or attachments.  Representatives of several monitoring device companies speaking at the Symposium stated that they are in discussions with FDA about the classification of their devices related to the integrity of the transmitted data, what medical decisions will be based upon the results, and the degree of validation required to gain 510(k) clearance of the device for use with different software on different electronic platforms. Medical manufacturers and the transmission system manufacturers continue to try to understand the value proposition to patients and where the profit resides.

Because the Connect Health vision is to create an environment where all monitoring devices or feedback communication devices can perform within any system, a standards group called Continua has developed out of this Connected Health community.  This group, comprised of head-to-head competitors in their core technologies, is working to establish software specifications and validation norms to be used across the telehealth industry, with the objective of complete and universal connectivity.  It remains to be seen, however, if FDA will accept this approach.

The challenges and the rewards of e-health will be great.  It will require collaborations like these forming in the Connected Health community and partnerships between the biotech industry, insurers/payors, and care providers (such as this joint venture between Cisco and UnitedHealth) to make e-health a reality.

Tags: American Telemedicine Association, connected health, Continua, e-health, telemedicine