By Gary M. Kaye,
Chief Content Officer, Tech50+ (www.tech50plus.com)
No matter the final form of a new healthcare policy, there is going to be continued pressure to control healthcare costs, especially as demand increases from the expanding aging population. When it comes to the nexus of technology and healthcare, there are few people who are more knowledgeable than Rick Valencia, president of Qualcomm Life.
His company has a dual mission: to develop new connected healthcare technologies and to invest in promising new connected healthcare companies. Valencia expressed enthusiasm for the company’s expanding partnership with United Healthcare to bring more capability to fitness tracking devices, part of a broader process to get information from people when they’re healthy, a major step towards prediction and prevention,
“We’re continuing to build out the internet of medical things and to enable what we call intelligent care everywhere, so the ability to maintain your health and of course manage your health conditions in the event that you’re not healthy wherever you happen to be. So instead of focusing just on the traditional care settings, getting activity wherever a patient may be and making that work in a very seamless way so that the patient doesn’t have to engage in the technology, it just works,” he said.
Valencia explained Qualcomm Life has developed a wirelessly connected patch that will remotely report vital signs. It’s really intended for post-operative patients. The idea is to measure their vitals before and after surgery, then send them home with the patch and monitor their progress without having to ask the patient report their own vitals. The patch, which could be used for three, seven, or 14 days will also measure gait, which not only predicts falls, but other physical conditions. He said that once the patch is FDA approved, Qualcomm will license it to someone else to build.
Valencia expects now that Medicare is willing to pay for remote doctor visits, the technology will expand. Some medical groups are already using things like iPads to conduct remote visits,
“The opportunity with technology to intervene in a way that you’re not having people sitting around making phone calls – it’s not going to happen overnight because the workflow and the process and procedure that need to be developed in the system on the health system side is going to take a while. But we’re making sure that the technology is available and ready and we are… we’re really going to have to start thinking about how we’re going to help accelerate this transformation by helping the system learn to use it because it’s not a technology problem. It’s all there, it’s an integration problem,” Valincia said.
I asked Valencia about his take on the how the industry might fare under the Trump Administration. Here’s his answer:
“Let’s start with the connected healthcare piece of it and the devices and the application as a device that would go through the FDA. That to me the signs are very good there. It feels to me like there’s a better chance for less regulation or at least more flexible regulation, streamlined processes. If anything that we’ve heard from our new administration there’s going to be less regulation, less big government in our lives. That portends to something interesting and better. I have to say the FDA has not been problematic, they’ve been reasonably good partners in this.
In terms of the Affordable Care Act, Valencia thinks the mandate that forces people to buy insurance will go away. But he says that’s bad news for the insurance companies since it means older, sicker people will sign up, and younger healthier people won’t. but he says, “it’s going to have to be replaced by something because we’ve put 20 million new people on the insurance rolls and I don’t think any administration wants to say for the better of the country you’re not going to have insurance anymore,” he said.
One way to reduce healthcare costs, he noted, is to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions. Remote monitoring of chronic at-risk populations such as those suffering from congestive heart failure and diabetes have shown dramatic reductions in readmissions, something Valencia thinks will become the norm,
“What we’re building is the connective tissue that puts the doctor and the patient together no matter where that patient is with informed data that allows a doctor to make a decision to tell that patient what to do next and eventually allows the patient themselves to know exactly what they should be doing next,” Valencia said.
The entire healthcare system is moving from a fee-for-service model to a payment model based on outcomes. Valencia said the “pay to perform” model is the only way to really change the system because it changes all the incentives,
“ They have to be told the only way you’re going to get paid for this is if you create a good outcome and by good outcome that means that you are aware of how your patient is doing and you’re providing your care at an affordable price and it becomes affordable not so much because it’s cheap but because you’re communicating with everybody in the care team… When you tell the system that will only get paid if it does a good job taking care of that patient these things will fall in place because they’ll have to,” he said
But Valencia thinks the entire process is taking too long,
“It’s horribly frustrating for me who comes from tech. In tech when you have stuff you deploy it you get it working and things get better and better and better. In healthcare, it just doesn’t work that way… Management in these big hospitals isn’t ready for it, they don’t know how to consume it, they don’t know how to retrain their staff. But they don’t have the motivation to do that. They will create structure… when they are faced with death or change they will accept change but until then they probably aren’t going to,” he added.
Gary Kaye is the creator of Tech50+ (www.tech50plus.com), the leading website covering technology from the Baby Boomer perspective. Kaye has been covering high tech for more than 30 years with outlets including NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox Business. He is a regular contributor to AARP and other websites on issues regarding the nexus of technology, seniors and baby boomers.
