MobCon Digital Health is the premiere one-day healthcare conference taking place April 8th at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis. The event brings together top medical industry experts and healthcare IT innovators to showcase the latest trends in digital healthcare. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage and share innovation, best practices, and digital and mobile strategies and innovation related to health and wellness, and traditional healthcare. With five educational tracks, exhibits, tech demos and unparalleled networking opportunities, it’s truly a “don’t miss” event. If you’re in the medical field and want to attend or just learn more about the sessions and attendees, you can do so here.
When you think digital health, one of the first things that may come to your mind is the new fascination with wearable tech. Not relegated to fitness anymore, wearable tech has opened up a whole new world for healthcare. These products can monitor and track everything from heart rate to activity to medications. The result is data, and lots of it. All this data is screaming to be shared and analyzed to enhance research opportunities, and improve diagnostics, healthcare services as well as the over-all wellbeing of users.
Modern healthcare is at a tipping point: Healthcare providers and IT experts are working diligently to utilize new cloud storage capabilities, wireless functionalities, and mobile phone technologies and determine how to best connect, collect, and care for all the data. While all are grappling in this moment to create devices that measure and respond to our health needs, all of it is meaningless without applying the data in the best possible ways. But there are challenges.
One such challenge is security. Devices are not immune to being hacked and the outcomes could be severe if security is not handled with the utmost care. Imagine a device being hacked and directed to shut down right when a user is expecting upon a life- saving treatment. A frightening scenario, to say the least. Arguably, security has to be one of the top priorities in digital health.
Another such challenge is user experience and ease-of-use. User error could have disastrous results. Protection against this is a challenge that every digital health and healthcare IT developer must conquer when considering wearable tech, remote patient/doctor interaction, mobile treatment or prescribing medication, or any of the other technologies available to healthcare providers and their patients today.
And the next wave of innovation to come? It may just be showcased in a place that can’t be seen… inside our bodies. Implantable devices ranging from advanced pacemakers to apparatuses placed inside to measure health indicators and treat a variety of illness have huge potential. Many of these devices are on the verge of hitting the market. The benefits include long-term health gains for chronic health conditions, continuous supply of data to physicians and healthcare practitioners and a reduction in expensive visits to hospitals and clinics, among others.
No matter the innovations to come, the biggest player in this digital healthcare game will be the rivers of accessible data. How we utilize it, share it, and even make monetize of it, will shape the future of our healthcare systems. Heath and wellness data, with safety and security top of mind, will be debated and deliberated on for years to come as devices and healthcare tech continue to evolve.
All these topics and more will be discussed, debated, and challenged at MobCon Digital Health in April. Also, be sure and check out our SMACTalk episode (#SMACTalkLive), where my colleagues Daniel Newman and Brian Fanzo dig deeper into the pros and cons of this burgeoning and brave new world of modern medicine. You can access the podcast via Libsyn here:
Or you can go to the iTunes store to access the podcast, by using this link: SMACTalkLive on iTunes
As always, you can access all of SMACTalkLive on demand on any of the following channels:
SMACTalkLive on iTunes
SMACTalkLive on Stitcher
SMACTalk Video Channel
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