4 highlights from the mHealth Summit

Thousands of people packed the conference rooms and ballrooms at the Gaylord Hotel at National Harbor near the District of Columbia this week.

And the word on everyone's lips was mHealth.

From hospital executives outlining how they use the latest mobile innovations to vendors touting cutting-edge technologies, the mHealth Summit showed how far the healthcare industry has come in integrating mobile tools into care, and the steps it needs to take to continue to expand their use.

The editors of our sister publications, FierceHealthIT and FierceMobileHealthcare, were there for it all.

Here are some of the highlights of the conference:

Apple HealthKit

Richard Milani, chief clinical transformation officer at New Orleans-based Ochsner Health System, and Ricky Bloomfield, director of mobile technology and strategy at Duke Medicine in North Carolina, answered questions about their hospitals' pilot programs integrating Apple's HealthKit with Epic EHR platforms during an open mic session Tuesday afternoon. Article

Health data analysis

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak believes that, despite all of the strides made in health IT over the last few years, data collection efforts have hit a lull. During a panel session Wednesday he offered up five topics that organizations must address when it comes to big data. Article

Mobile use across the continuum of care

Patient care can span from the day someone steps into a hospital and through the entirety of his or her life--and mHealth is starting to add real value to that continuum of care. Panelists kicked off Tuesday's events by talking about what their organizations are doing to leverage mobile healthcare and how they address issues as they arise. Article

Population health management

For population health management partnerships to be successful, it's important to figure out and understand the phenotype of a community, according to Dana Ball, executive director of the T1D Exchange, which looks to facilitate better care for Type 1 diabetes patients. Speaking on a panel at the summit on Monday, Ball said the first priority is to intimately know your community and what its members value prior to trotting out potential technological solutions to their problems. Article

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