Bringing HealthCare Home to the Patient: Video With Dr Joseph Kvedar

At the recent mHealth Summit 2011 in Washington DC, one of the main themes was bringing healthcare home to the patient.  Mobile technology would allow remote monitoring and communication of results to the healthcare team.  Patients would be empowered to play a major role in their own care.  Below is a short video of  Dr. Joseph Kvedar,  Founder and Director of the Center for Connected Health.  Dr.

At the recent mHealth Summit 2011 in Washington DC, one of the main themes was bringing healthcare home to the patient.  Mobile technology would allow remote monitoring and communication of results to the healthcare team.  Patients would be empowered to play a major role in their own care.  Below is a short video of  Dr. Joseph Kvedar,  Founder and Director of the Center for Connected Health.  Dr. Kvedar’s work entails the use of mobile technology to take healthcare out of traditional medical settings and into the home.

Video transcript (by TranscriptionStar)

Joan:  Hallo, I am Joan Justice with HealthWorks Collective and I am here today at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC.  I have with me Dr. Joseph Kvedar, founder and director of The Center for Connected Health.  Dr. Kvedar just participated in a discussion entitled ‘Mobile Health in the Clinical Enterprise’. Dr. Kvedar, what do you do at Connected Health and how does that fit into the discussion you just participated in?

Dr. Kvedar:  Our vision at the Center for Connected Health is that we can move healthcare out of hospital and the doctors’ office and into the lives of our patients.  We want to make care more continuous, we want to make care just in time and above and beyond both of those we want to improve self-care.  So we utilize technology such as monitoring tools, mobile phones, computers, networks to gather information about patients and about consumers educating them about how their lifestyle affects their illness, improving self-care in that way and feeding the same information to healthcare providers in a dashboard format enabling them to do just in time interventions when they see the need.  And in doing that we are able to show that we can improve the quality of care and lower the cost of care something that everyone is trying to do these days.  Particular, we have had good luck with chronic illnesses such a heart failure, diabetes and hypertension.

Joan:  Okay, thanks.  And second question, what in your opinion are the most important take away so far at this conference?

Dr. Kvedar:  Well, one thing is that the marketplace is exploding with interesting ideas.  If you walked the exhibit floor, it’s actually dizzying the number of new entrants into the marketplace and the kinds of wonderful innovations that they are coming forth with.  So we will need to settle down, there will be consolidation, there will be some shakeups, some of these folks won’t be here next year, some will be here in two years, some will succeed and we will have to follow them all and see how they do.  I do think that the ones that will succeed are the ones that are engaging to consumers and patients and I really believe that the most important thing that we can do in the next coming years to improve the healthcare situation in the developed world.

Joan:  Yeah, I hear more and more at this convention that it’s bringing the responsibility for healthcare to the patient and have the patient actually take care of him or herself.  That seems to be the big word that I am hearing.

Dr. Kvedar:  Yeah, I think that is a common theme and well needed and we can’t do it fast enough.

Joan:  Thank you so much for your time Dr. Kvedar.