Traditional barriers to adoption
A physician’s limited time is one of the key barriers to medical wearable adoption. Waqaas affirms “In conjunction with developing wearables that utilize clinical-grade data, health technology companies must derive solutions that will make it easier for physicians to extrapolate the right patient data at the right time.” Medical wearable devices should have the capacity to categorize and summarize data to create maximum value for physician use. In addition to assisting physicians sift through volumes of data, and finding the relevant information they need to diagnose or monitor a patient’s condition, a medical wearable solution must also fit into a physician’s workflow.
How data and IT integration is key to physician acceptance
Medical wearables could gain greater physician acceptance by providing data that is clinically relevant and that measures clinical improvement. Clinical improvement is vital to a preventive healthcare system, and medical wearables could track patient improvement by creating a baseline measurement of patient data and then benchmarking future metrics against this initial measurement. Even if medical wearables would provide pertinent clinical-grade data, they should also fit into an infrastructure that enables their integration into the physician’s workflow. Waqaas maintains “Health technology companies and physicians alike must uncover how wearable technology can be utilized and deployed under different circumstances and in different scenarios.” The solution should not require heavy internal or patient training, it should be interoperable, and it should be insurance reimbursable.
Read the entire article here. Waqaas’ article is available on HIStalk. HIStalk provides news coverage, opinion, and commentary on leading healthcare IT topics.
