Hospital leaders must shepherd consumer health tech to better outcomes

With the advent of consumer health technology, amid an increasingly outcomes-focused healthcare market, it’s incumbent on healthcare providers to develop strategies to manage this IT influx, according to an article in Hospitals & Health Networks.

As healthcare overall becomes more consumer-focused, technological advances such as wearables and genetic testing put more information than ever at consumers’ fingertips. Providers must help consumers put that information in context and use it toward improved outcomes, writes Spencer Nam, a senior research fellow in healthcare at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. 

While both consumer and provider respondents to a survey conducted by Scripps Health last fall expressed support for new health technologies, consumers were far more enthusiastic about such offerings than their provider counterparts.

Rather than thinking of consumer health technology as a way to generate new revenues, hospitals should think of it as a method to help patients manage their health, improve outcomes and reduce healthcare costs, Nam writes.

Providers can also save money and physical space by keeping healthy patients out of beds. That can be done through sensor technology to monitor measures such as sleep patterns, mobility and blood pressure.

To be effective, Nam adds, this information must be consolidated and standardized, rather than healthcare providers trying to understand large amounts of raw data without analyzing it.

“One of the biggest challenges of the current healthcare system is a lack of standardization,” he writes. “We are headed in the right direction, but health institutions can accelerate the paradigm shift by figuring out how to manage the explosion of technology.”

To learn more:
- read the article