Left to right, Adam Pellegrini of Fitbit, Karthik Ranjan of ARM, Chintan Gohil from Verizon and Dr. James Mault from Qualcomm Life discuss the Internet of Things at the 2016 Connected Health Conference.
It’s been nearly two years since Verizon Communications essentially walked away from offering direct telehealth services. (The effort lasted barely six months.)
Do not expect the company to get back into the field anytime soon, as Verizon seems content providing the telecom services behind the scenes rather than getting back into online patient visits.
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“There are a lot of solutions out there. We want to work with them to find the best ones,” Chintan Gohil, managing partner of Verizon Healthcare’s Internet of Things operations, told MedCity News.
Gohil spoke on a panel on the IoT in healthcare Tuesday at the Connected Health Conference at National Harbor, Maryland, in which executives from several major IoT companies talked mostly about potential.
“It’s still not ubiquity,” Dr. James Mault, chief medical officer of Qualcomm Life said. He ticked off a “big 5” requirements for wide acceptance of a technology in healthcare, and said the IoT is not there yet.
- It has to be an effortless user experience. Adding Bluetooth and requiring manual configuration makes it “clunky,” according to Mault.
- It has to be medical-grade because people will be making “life-and-death decisions” with these devices, he said.
- Workflow needs to be embedded in downstream systems and users need to be trained to take advantage the mass of new information IoT devices will generate.
- There must be a clear value proposition for specific use cases.
- Someone has to be willing to pay for it, and this usually does not happen until the first four elements are in place.
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A decade ago, Mault worked with Adam Pellegrini at Microsoft, where they struggled to gain consumer acceptance for the HealthVault personal health records platform. The pair then jumped to Mault’s startup, HealthyCircles, which Qualcomm bought in 2009. Pellegrini went on to Walgreens and this year, became head of digital health for Fitbit.
“Real change, behavior change is actually happening,” Pellegrini said on the same conference panel. “We are definitely in an upswing in this area.”
Karthik Ranjan, director of healthcare technology and emerging technologies at chip licensing company ARM, said that behavioral change represents merely a short-term opportunity for IoT in healthcare. He noted that the back of smartphones are pretty much blank. “That area is ripe for putting medical sensors,” Ranjan said.
More importantly, the market opportunity, in theory, is unlimited. “It could cover all [7 billion] people on the planet,” he said.
“We’re really at the beginning of where wearables are going to go. Imaging being able to do this on a sticker,” Mault said as he affixed a “smart” bandage to Gohil’s jacket.
“The work ahead is to figure out what to do with the information,” Mault added.
Photo: Neil Versel/MedCity News