Healthcare providers must encourage patients to take charge of their health by engaging with them through technology, according to Maulik D. Majmudar, M.D., clinical cardiologist and associate director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Majmudar spoke at multiple events during the recent American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in New Orleans this week.
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“To get to the Triple Aim and do it in a cost-effective way, we need to leverage technology like mobile applications and wearable devices to monitor people in their own environments; when they are not in front of their doctor or in the hospital, which is 99.9 percent of the time,” he said, according to a report in Medical Economics.
The result will be a more connected relationship through technologies that provide ongoing encouragement and feedback on the patient’s health, he said.
Technologies such as connected blood pressure cuffs and weight scales can be used to help people better manage their chronic disease and prevent hospital readmission and adverse events, he pointed out.
A central question, however, is how to point patients toward apps effective in their self-management efforts.
While the number of health-oriented apps is proliferating, there’s a lack of evidence on their safety and effectiveness, making it a real challenge to cull the best ones to recommend, he said in a second talk.
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Majmudar urged academics to collaborate with the healthcare industry on research to provide an evidence base for health-related apps.
At the conference, Kevin R. Campbell, M.D., from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill College of Medicine, talked about what he learned at the conference, saying cardiologists "continue to innovate and attack the most complex problems of our age."
He also touched on the impact of social media channels like Facebook and Twitter on HCPLive.com.
“Social media is where our patients are and where we need to be,” he said. See the video below for more: