New technology now involves the patient

Regardless of how well a nurse, physician, or other healthcare professional conducts monitoring, its ultimate success lies with just one individual on the care team: the patient. If the monitoring and assessment are too labor-intensive, their costs can offset some or all of the savings expected from the disease management program.

Disease management programs place a high value on educating patients about their conditions and expect they will play an active and engaged role in their own care. In this approach to healthcare, the more the patient becomes an equal partner on the care team, the more efficiently and effectively the programs are likely to run.

What has been missing is a way for the disease management team to share the data easily so that the right information gets to the right people at the right time. Today, new technology, especially network-enabled home monitoring devices that provide real-time information, can use Bluetooth, cell, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

New remote patient monitoring technology allows the real possibility of providing easy, interactive, up-to-the-minute, and even real-time links between doctor, patient, care manager, and family caregiver.

Adoption of these techniques is now possible because today more than 50 percent of patients with chronic-care conditions have Internet access, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And nearly 90 percent of Americans have mobile phones, according to Harris Interactive.

These home healthcare devices are creating a new healthcare business opportunity. Market growth for home health monitoring has been phenomenal. Recently, Intel and GE both issued market forecasts that sales of these devices will grow to $7.7 billion by 2012 in the US alone.

John Hummel
Chief Technology Officer
Dell Services, Healthcare