There are some things you shouldn’t try at home. Television usually likes to remind us about this seconds before someone attempts a death-defying stunt. And no matter how much you surf WebMD, medical care falls into that leave-it-to-the-pros category, too.
But the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovations Summit showed that the definition of home health care is changing. Technology will ultimately provide doctors the ability to visit via video conference and medical observation to take place at home.
One of the innovations I discovered at the summit was Itamar Medical’s mobile sleep lab, known as WatchPAT. The device helps diagnose sleep apnea, a serious condition that triples the likelihood of stroke and quadruples the risk of heart attack. A proper diagnosis, however, has always involved a trip to a research facility for a formal study.
Even though I sleep well, Itamar Medical president and CEO Dr. Dov Rubin gave me a mobile sleep lab to try at home: I simply put the wristwatchlike device on my arm, stuck my index finger in the small sleeve attached to the device and pressed the start button. “Good Night” flashed on the watch face, letting me know I’d done it right. When I awoke, I took off the device and returned it. Dr. Rubin plugged it into a laptop that generated a detailed report any physician could use to treat me. As expected, I slept well and even had three long dreams, which I didn’t remember.
The hope is that advancements such as WatchPAT will motivate more people to seek treatment and submit to medical testing.
Would we all be more rigorous about our health if we could get checkups without having to leave home? That’s one of the questions being asked by Case Connection Zone, an experimental project to find out how people and communities can benefit from Internet speeds hundreds of times faster than the national average.
“It’s the first smart and connected community project intentionally designed and lit up at gigabit speeds to explore how research conducted at a great research university can have an impact on the things that matter to the community like safety, health and wellness, education, and energy,” explains Case CIO Lev Gonick.
The ultrahigh Web speeds allow innovators to develop products and services that require such infrastructure.
And while the Jetsons-like Internet speeds offered to the Hessler neighborhood around Case are years away for the rest of us, we should all soon see the benefits of electronic medical records. They can be accessed and shared quickly and promise to reduce mistakes.
Of course, privacy issues must be addressed, but according to the panel of CIO’s at the Clinic’s Medical Innovations Summit, the information technology field is up to that challenge.
The focus of this year’s Clinic summit was obesity and diabetes, and Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen were the headliners. The vastness of the obesity epidemic — two-thirds of the U.S. is overweight, and one-third is obese — is translating into some very real problems. One hundred people have an amputation and 60 people go blind every day in the U.S. because of obesity and diabetes, and it’s been estimated our weight problems have a more than $1 trillion annual economic impact.
Many innovative technologies at the summit were developed to address the issue — from a low-tech plastic plate that limits portion sizes to a process that deadens your sense of smell for six months so food is uninviting. Intel also showed off its joint venture with General Electric, which provides remote patient monitoring of blood pressure, heart rate and other vitals.
But maybe the most impressive commitment to merging technology and health care is coming from Microsoft. The software giant has 1,400 people solely dedicated to it. Microsoft’s Chris Gempel demonstrated various technologies that his company is working on with health partners such as the Cleveland Clinic.
In one interesting initiative, 250 people took at-home readings of their heart rate, glucose, weight or blood pressure, depending on their disease. The data was then uploaded to HealthVault, a secure, Web-based storage platform, which then shared those numbers with the electronic medical record system used by the Clinic.
For some, the at-home monitoring cut down significantly on visits to a physician’s office. Those with diabetes and high blood pressure increased their number of days between visits by 71 percent and 26 percent, respectively, meaning patients were in better control of their conditions. Conversely, the pilot study discovered that heart failure patients should visit their doctors more often with days between visits decreasing by 27 percent.
With an aging population, expect to see more tech products — including the paperless Boogie Board, an LCD tablet developed by Kent Displays — being adapted for use in home health care. A tree-friendly alternative to memo pads, sketchbooks and sticky notes, the device is also being used to normalize the lives of Alzheimer’s sufferers, allowing family and caretakers an easy way to leave notes and lists. The device could also benefit throat surgery patients, those with autism and emergency room doctors.
This is just the beginning. Soon technology will allow for wireless devices implanted in scales and running shoes to transmit data to your electronic medical records. Yeah, it may be a little Orwellian, but it also may be the sort of innovation that leads to motivation, giving us the real-time feedback that’ll push us to start making healthier decisions about our lives. And, as any doctor will tell you, that starts at home.
Great Lakes Geek Dan Hanson (hanson@inside-business.com) aced his sleep test without studying.