The Personalized Healthcare Ecosystem of the Future: Welcome to the Year 2030

Against your better judgment, you've just checked your contact lens-enabled news feed. You're annoyed, because President Meghan McCain has just used the Trump Doctrine to "fire" Medicare's lead administrator over the botched roll-out of the Agency's block-chain claims payment system.  The mild spike in sweat stress chemicals detected by your clothing sensors prompts a boost in the transcutaneous dosing of the blood pressure pharmaceuticals from the networked skin patch on your thigh. 

 

It's the year 2030, and personalized "eDxTx" (ecosystems of Diagnosis and Treatment) has arrived for a lucky few who are able to afford it. That has created political headaches for the President and her campaign promise to bring Medicare out of the 20th century. Your decision to opt out of "Medicare for All" (a.k.a "TrumpCare") has been expensive, but worth it because your Geico insurance plan includes eHealth as a covered benefit.  Geico's ability to automate all underwriting and claims handling means high service standards and keeping costs down. Plus, those video ads are still cool.

Thanks to ubiquitous wireless connectivity, cloud-based machine intelligence and mass-personalized medicine, you and your private doctor's team were able to configure a suite of customizable off-the-shelf apps that meet your goals for living well as well as long.  The first step was your $2 psychometric, biomic and genetic testing (the expense of a mitochondrial analysis was offset with an agreement with the laboratory, Theranos, to pool your data with other customers) that spotlighted the optimum mix of nutrition and pharmaceuticals to blunt your risk of Type 15 Hypertension and GAB15a-linked gastrointestinal cancer. 

As you sit down and use the heads up display in your lens to ponder the short-list of candidates to replace the fired administrator (a well-placed leak suggests it reportedly includes Elizabeth Holmes), the patch modulates your drug dosing to account for the change in body position.

You're hungry and looking forward to your specially tailored evening meal that is being drone-delivered to your patio in.... your contact lens again... 28 minutes. 

This is one of the five days out of the week that you adhere to a configured meal of calories, carbs, proteins, fats, nutraceuticals, probiotics and prebiotics that's adjusted to meet your taste preferences. It will also achieve an optimal body fat percentage, and reduce your risk of cancer and a host of other chronic conditions. The other two days use competitive gamification that is linked to your online preferences to reward you with a real burger for meeting your nutrition goals.  Not for everyone, but your behavioral reward profile suggested that that would help motivate you to stick to the diet. Who knew?

You ponder getting a burger tonight, but fight the temptation by triggering a mindfulness app through your lens.  The lights in your living space also dim and a riff made up of an pleasing artificial jazz-indie chord progression offers a well-placed distraction.

Diet and risk reduction are not the only an ingredients you use to achieve your goal of living 105 years, but also participating in next month's Goggle Spartan Race.  Come to think of it, time to tailor a set of 3D printed sneakers. You look forward to you and your personal life-drone (your spouse suggests it's more evidence of your narcissism; you've named it "Donald" to confirm her suspicions and annoy her) competing in a mix of virtual and real obstacles in a course of that includes real rope climbing and a virtual 3-D avatar obstacle course. The drone and wearables will network, monitor and heads-up display your neuro and cardiovascular dashboard for optimal performance. It will also use the same technology that they used in hospitals to anticipate any medical emergencies that could happen to you.

Naturally, your drone will use artificial intelligence to image, edit and securely post the race video for friends and family to view.

That's what you did last year, when the video also showed you twisting your ankle.  You had to go to a treatment center and be evaluated the old fashioned way, where a doctor treated you.  Some things never change, but avoiding those opaque bills and paying your deductible using virtual currency was so convenient.

As your pour yourself your recommended 1.2 ounces of bourbon (personalized by the distillery with a proprietary combination of esters and lactones to create your preferred finish), you reflect on how healthcare has changed since the days of in-home monitoring and physician teleconferencing. It worked well while it lasted, but was soon eclipsed by the cloud-based technology that combined physician intelligence ("physint") with Watson (artificial intelligence) that "scaled" in an era of fully automated care. 

Sort of like the driverless car that will take you to next month's race.

Speaking of old fashioned cars, that eDxTx medical alert last year reminded you of that old fashioned "check engine" light.  It seems a biochemical marker profile was consistent with the presence of an early stage tumor.  Based on your past medical data, the calculated Bayesian risk that the tumor was real approached 1%.  Watchful waiting using Medicare's IPAB guideline recommendations was raised as an option by your doctor, but you decided to undergo the additional testing to rule it out.  Naturally, your insurance covered most of that cost.

You finish your bourbon after you get an alert that the pizza has arrived.  You silently wish President McCain good luck. Some things never change.

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2016 is the Breakout Year for mHealth: Savings vs. Value

In this post, the Population Health Blog predicts how and why mHealth will be covered by more commercial health insurers in 2016, and why the retail "over the counter" mHealth market outside of insurance coverage will also continue to grow. 

 

While you're reading, consider this simple question: What are the revolutions per minute (RPMs) of your automobile's engine as you ascend from stationary idling to freeway speed?

 

The Definition of mHealth: "the delivery of healthcare services via mobile communication devices." Other definitions can be found here.  Elements include handhelds, wireless communications, software, hardware, networking, social media, sensor technology, apps and cloud-based services. The World Health Organization says it's global and much is still in its infancy.

 

Three Population Health Blog predictions for mHealth in the United States:

 

1) 2016 will be a breakout year, because both the savings and value propositions will be clarified.

 

What does the PHB mean by this? 

 

The ultimate question for health services buyers, payers, providers and patients is whether mHealth technology is: 

 

Substitutive: achieving savings from displacing present or future high cost services,

 

or

 

Additive: co-existing with present, or increasing future utilization.

 

The same is true for many pharmaceuticals, population health programs and the medical home.   

 

2) Faced with the reemergence of unsustainable health care cost inflation, commercial health insurers will deploy today's premium to sponsor tomorrow's substitutive mHealth cost reductions.

 

Commercial insurers will look for mHealth that is "S³" or Smart, Synergistic and Scalable.

 

1. Smart: addresses the tailored needs of selected population segments; instead of being all things to all patients, think focusing mHealth on high risk patients with special needs. 

 

2. Synergistic: enhances, not replaces other incumbent resources, such as one-on-one care management or outreach telephony.  

 

3) Scalable: uses the economies of scale to provide a lower-cost service to larger numbers of consumers.  As more patients in a select population use mHealth, the cheaper it becomes. 

 

3) But.....Value-driven mHealth will also flourish in the direct-to-consumer, over-the-counter or retail market for three reasons:

 

1) Consumer notions of value: 

 

Interest in personal wellness, a cultural belief in the pervading merits of technology and the allure of every more innovative gadgetry will continue to outpace the underlying mHealth abandonment rate.

 

2) As Obamacare acquaints consumers with real healthcare costs, #mHealth will be viewed as a relative bargain.

 

Comparatively pricey physician encounters, emergency room visits or a hospital stays - especially for Bronze Plan enrollees - will only increase consumer appreciation for  mHealth's "over the counter" benefit-to-cost ratio: for a few extra bucks, why not have that weight-loss, blood-pressure, medication-management app or wearable, especially when you already have a handheld smart device and the bandwidth?

 

3) Some commercial insurers will "cover" wellness #mHealth, not because their actuaries support it, but because their customers (purchasers, brokers and consumers) demand it. 

 

"Coverage" will be in the form of a volume-based discount pricing borne by the consumer, not a value-based benefit covered by the insurer. If it increases customer loyalty/"stickiness," all the better.

 

Plus there's the mHealth "X-Factor." mHealth sponsors and their allies will collect, sell and use consumer data for marketing and surveillance.   The PHB calls it mining and monetizing. 

 

Back to the tachometer: Even though its dashboard displays it, the PHB doesn't know the vehicle's RPMs either. Aside from  the use of the tachometer by some car enthusiasts  to optimize manual gear shifting, it adds little to car performance or safety. 

 

Yet, it's standard and in the dashboard of just about every automobile being sold in the U.S.A.  Could gadgets, wearables, apps and mHealth physiologic monitoring become the healthcare tachometer?  Useful to a critical few and standard for everyone else?

 

So, What is the the Basis of the PHB's Predictions?

 

Growth potential:

 

None other than Eric Topol says "Until now, most of the effect of the digital era in the practice of medicine has been confined to electronic health records. But that is about to undergo a radical transformation in the next 5 years." As in $50 billion by 2020.

 

If you think it's all about "Fitbit" or managing diabetes, think again. How about promoting mindfulness, monitoring medication compliance, home-based high-risk pregnancy monitoring, in-home safety for the frail elderly, heart rhythm management, and home-based "pervasive" monitoring. Plus, mHealth style technology is being used outside of healthcare, such as in the automobile, for elite athletes and to promote safety in high-risk worksites

 

S³  = Savings

 

Smart: Here's a just-published JAMA study of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) that showed text-prompts had an clinically relevant impact on blood pressure in a group of select persons with coronary heart disease. Here's an rigorously conducted RCT that showed persons with Type 1 diabetes mellitus achieved better blood glucose control.  How about socioeconomically vulnerable patients with diabetes? Or patients with heart failure being discharged from a hospital?  The list of special populations with special needs goes on and on.

 

Synergy - This exhaustive peer-reviewed publication examining the merits of wellness mHealth for weight management, physical activity promotion, tobacco cessation, and cholesterol control shows that there's little evidence that it's better than existing therapies over the long-term.  Rather, the greatest promise appears to be in complementing existing interventions.  By the way, synergy does not mean overwhelming the system with data, but assisting the system with insight.

 

Scalable: While economists, policymakers and pundits legitimately worry whether bigger is better for healthcare in general, health system C-suites and boards of directors and their consultants are counting on information technology to drive economies of scale.  Papers like this and this suggest mHealth can be a part of that, especially if it can mitigate manpower constraints.

 

And an easy way to assess whether the insurer  really believes that it's sponsoring an S³ initiative is asking whether it pays for a handheld device for consumers that don't have one

 

Value:

 

Consumerism? Call it "the quantified patient." Here's a telling survey that shows the abiding faith in health information technology and a lack of privacy concerns.

 

 Bargain? The title of this peer-reviewed paper says it all" "It's like having a physician in your pocket!"

 

 Insurer discounts? The same thing happened to health club memberships.

 

The X-Factor: CIOs everywhere agree that they're not only apps, but software "vacuuming up data."

 

Image from Wikipedia

 

 

Smartphone Apps: Architecture Trumps Content

According to this The Wall Street Journal article, the prospect that "your doctor may soon prescribe you a smartphone app," has put us on the cusp of a new age of m-healthiness. 

 

Regular Population Health Blog readers are not surprised. They have an "over-the-horizon" awareness of health information technology and know that the health app ecosystem has been flourishing for quite some time. 

 

What is surprising, however, is how the news article from a prestigious news organization conflated architecture and content. 

 

The PHB explains.

 

The WSJ article describes how intrepid e-researchers from marquee academic institutions are documenting the impact of apps on medication compliance, symptom management, risk reduction and provider-patient communication. Once users open these apps, there's not only an eHealth technology platform but an accompanying library of tailored e-prompts, e-reminders, e-pop-ups, e-recommendations, e-messaging, e-images and e-videos.  Mix one app with one patient and quality goes up and costs go down.

 

Unfortunately, what the article failed to mention is that much of that content made up of information that is freely available in the public domain, and that these app developers have reconfigured and adapted it according to the interests, expertise and culture of their sponsoring institutions.

 

While policymakers and researchers would like to believe that on-line and public domain health information is a commodity, the fact is that buyer, purchaser and provider organizations have been accessing and downloading it for years.  They've take special pride of ownership in the wording, editing, formatting, presentation of that content.  That's what makes it "theirs" for both their providers and their patients.  After all, all healthcare is local.

 

This has important implications for the smartphone app indsutry.  While the academic e-researchers and business e-developers dream of having their apps adopted by delivery systems everywhere, the problem is that their apps are often tethered to their own organizations' content. 

 

In other words, you can have any breast cancer, heart failure or post-hospital discharge smartphone-based solution that you want, just so long as you also import their prompts, reminders, pop-ups, recommendations, messages, images and videos. 

 

The Population Health Blog believes the secret sauce for competitive success for app developers is accordingly three-fold:

 

1) Architecture Trumps Content: Smart app developers understand that the value proposition of the underlying technology architecture is separate from the value proposition of the content.  The app itself needs to be independently stable, secure and snappy with minimal branching logic, an easy-to-use interface and freedom from annoying bugs, whether it's heart failure in for a hundred patients in Halifax or a dozen persons with diabetes in Des Moines. 

 

2) Architecture Supports Content: Very smart app developers also understand that the architecture should be able to accommodate any content that is preferred by their customers. If ABC Regional Health System wants their in-house policies, procedures, pamphlets, web-pages, in-house guidelines and electronic record prompts to be reflected in a smartphone app, then the app's framework should be able to import it.  Think plug and play.

 

3) Architecture Has Content: That being said, not every buyer, purchaser or provider will have all the content needed to manage a target population. That means app developers will need to have generic content ready to go to fill in the gaps. 

 

The business case for apps may be similar to selling a house.  First off, make sure the foundation is solid and the roof is intact.  Be prepared to move walls and windows, if that's what the buyer wants.  And, if the house needs to be furnished with some furniture, do it; if the buyer wants some or all of their furniture to furnish the house, do it.

 

Image from Wikipedia