AsianScientist (Sep. 30, 2013) – Vaibhav Bhandari, Director of Product Management at Optum, a subsidiary of United Health Group, is a big believer in digital health. He is a software professional experienced in technical development, having worked on projects such as Microsoft HealthVault, a web-based platform that where patients can collect, store and share their health information online.
On day two of Techventure 2013, which took place at the Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre last week, Bhandari gave a talk titled Healthcare 2.0: Innovation And Disruptive Opportunities With Technology In Healthcare. He began his talk by providing statistics on how digital health funding has grown tremendously in recent years.
“Over the past two years, there has been overall year-on-year funding growth of over 23 percent and deal growth of over 17 percent,” he said.
But while funding for digital health is rapidly overtaking traditional forms of healthcare, it still has a way to go to catch up with funding for software, he said.
“For the first half of 2013, digital health funding growth was over 12 percent, leading traditional healthcare but trailing software,” he said.
The three ‘D’s of digital health
Software funding was up 38 percent according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said Bhandari, but where is all the funding for digital health going to? He sees this segment of the healthcare industry comprising of three key areas: devices, digital doctors and data science. The first of these, wearable devices, are empowering patients to manage their personal healthcare, he said.
Like Chikodi Chima, Vice-President of Business Development at Cleantech Law Partners, Bhandari sees wearable devices as a game-changer in healthcare, and wearable devices are at the forefront of what Bhandari calls the “digital revolution causing the creative destruction of medicine.”
“These devices are not intrusive, they are automated,” he said, which allows the user to monitor and control their behavior and habits.
He described the example of the ZIO-XT patch, a personal tracker device used to improve the accuracy of cardiac arrhythmia diagnosis. Instead of the patient being monitored in a clinic over several days, Bhandari explained that the ZIO-XT patch could be easily fitted during a short appointment in the clinic. After that, the patient could go home and resume their daily life as usual, while the device continuously tracked their heart rhythms over two weeks.
Once the monitoring period was over, the device would be sent to a clinical center where the data stored in the device would be processed and analyzed. A report highlighting identified arrhythmias would then be sent to the doctor. What this meant for patients, Bhandari explained, was lower cost, less psychological stress and more accurate diagnoses.
Moving on to digital doctors, Bhandari raised the example of the PatientsLikeMe website, a platform where patients shared their health data in the form of healthcare experiences and outcomes. By openly sharing this data, Bhandari said that patients could not only help accelerate research into diseases that could be hindered by privacy regulations, but also benefit personally by “crowdsourcing” for medical advice such as preventative measures.
“These online portals are changing the way patients manage their conditions and the way that medical interventions are devised,” Bhandari said.
Turning to data science, Bhandari lamented the archaic way in which health records were transferred between providers, for example, from general practitioners to hospitals or even between hospital departments. In the Internet age, healthcare seemed stuck in a different century, he said, with patient data still primarily transported by a largely outmoded form of communication: the facsimile.
Nevertheless, the healthcare industry was slowly inching toward replacing the humble fax with secure internet-based direct communication, he said. In the US, for example, an open source standard for sharing health data was gradually gaining momentum.
The way in which health data was presented to the patient was also changing, he said. As patients become more savvy through the use of wearable devices and turning to digital doctors online, Bhandari believes that patients are increasingly asking for healthcare data in a consumer-friendly, easy to digest format. Gone are the days of plain text medical reports that are difficult to interpret, he said.
Citing the example of iBlueButton, an initiative by the United States government “to give Americans easy access to their medical information online,” Bhandari advocated this as one way in which national healthcare spending can be reduced.
“By sharing patient data in an accessible manner, doctors can refine medical care needs and discourage unnecessary visits to the hospital emergency room.”
The downside of digital health
The ubiquity of health-related data collection, from medical devices to healthcare reports online, means that the data can be mined for information such as global trends of infectious diseases, Bhandari said. An example of this was when the search engine Google attempted in recent years to predict global influenza trends based on web searches for influenza-related terms, he said.
While the predicted trend fairly closely followed the actual number of influenza cases around the world at the initial stages, Bhandari said that growing media hype over a possible “influenza pandemic,” caused first by the swine flu followed by the avian flu, resulted in web searches in this field to surge. This meant that Google Analytics turned out an inflated trend prediction that did not correlate with reality, he said.
Data security and patient safety were two additional areas innovators should be mindful of, he noted. While the empowerment of patients meant that users could take greater ownership over their healthcare management, he warned that this conversely increased the risks associated with less oversight by doctors.
Despite these issues, Bhandari believes that the growth of health data in the age of digital health will benefit patients in the long run. Summing up at the end, he recommended all innovators to ask the key question:
“Who drives healthcare? Is it the patient, who is the payer, or is it the provider?”
Opportunities for innovation and disruption in healthcare would be found at the intersection of information flow between the individual user, the community and the healthcare provider, he said.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine.
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