Big data and analytic tools have not yet been harnessed to bring meaningful improvement to the healthcare industry. That's according to a new report from the National Quality Forum outlining the challenges to making health data and analytics more usable and available in real time for providers and consumers. Whereas big data has supported improvement in certain settings, such as reducing ventilator-acquired pneumonia, data analytics has been largely overlooked in the area of healthcare costs, even though this data can inform and assess efforts to improve the affordability and quality of care. What's more, effective data management is necessary for the success of other incentives to enhance care, such as payment programs, as providers need timely information to understand where to improve and track their progress.
When you're sick, you face formidable problems. You don't feel well, you're in an emotional turmoil, you can't think straight. To make matters worse, when the physician is taking a medical history and physical exam either in his office or in the hospital, he has his back to you most of the visit while he looks at the computer. The electronic medical record has shifted focus of the physician's attention on the computer rather than you, the patient. Michele Ross is fed up with the lack of doctors' personal skills. She receives her healthcare at a clinic and sees a different doctor each time.
For years, the cutting edge of medicine has promised nanobots. Tiny little machines that could run around your body delivering drugs, checking up on arteries, and generally keeping people healthy. But so far, those machines haven't quite come to dominate the way some people thought they might. The human body is vastly more complicated than any robot we've ever made. So creating a miniscule robot to go inside of it, to work with that vast infrastructure, and to do our bidding, is a huge challenge.
IBM's love affair with Watson continues. Big Blue is buying Merge Healthcare, a provider of medical imaging gear, and plans to incorporate that technology into its Watson franchise. Merge's technology is used by more than 7,500 healthcare sites in the U.S., according to the Armonk, N.Y. based company. Now Merge's know-how will be added to the Watson Health Cloud mix to provide "new insights from a consolidated, patient-centric view of current and historical images, electronic health records, data from wearable devices and other related medical data, in a HIPAA-enabled environment," according to IBM's statement. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a regulation designed to protect patient data confidentiality.
Yelp is adding a ton of health-care data to its review pages for medical businesses to give consumers more access to government information on hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis clinics. Consumers can now look up a hospital emergency room's average wait time, fines paid by a nursing home, or how often patients getting dialysis treatment are readmitted to a hospital because of treatment-related infections or other problems. The review site is partnering with ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization based in New York. ProPublica compiled the information from its own research and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Wearable fitness devices and smartphone health apps that generate continuous streams of data will be the biggest catalysts for change at your doctor's office in the coming decades. Investors seem excited about the potential. Digital health startups attracted investments of $6.5 billion in 2014, a 125 percent increase from the previous year. If the momentum continues, wearables—coupled with social and analytic platforms based in the cloud—are poised to offer a new digitized picture of our health in the next decade. Here are five trends accelerating this convergence of physiology and technology: