CHICAGO — New health technologies that focus on self-management of patients may be a unique way for cardiologists to engage with their patients, according to a presentation at the Cardiometabolic Health Congress.
Patrick Wayte, senior vice president of the American Heart Association Center for Health Technology and Innovation, said the center focuses on the intersection of medical and consumer technologies, especially as there has been an increase in consumer technology products that concentrate on health care and engage consumers in different ways.
“It’s really in this blending, this mixing that we tend to think of as — generally speaking — health tech, which gives the broadest prospective on what’s possible in this marketplace,” Wayte said during the presentation. “One of the things we’re trying to do as a center and as a science-based organization … is build this wonderful intersection of evidence-based science — in our case, developed and driven digitally — to a wide range of technology solutions.”
Health engagement challenge
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Despite there being an assumed benefit to the use of this technology, there currently is a health engagement challenge among patients, as there is too much information, too many choices, the difficulty in adapting to this technology, feeling alone in the process and also trying to figure out who they can trust, according to the presentation.
“All of this information is oriented around life,” Wayte said during the presentation. “Patients spend a relatively short period of their time in medical care, and that goes with respect to traditional hospitals and clinical environments, but also just in front of doctors. The reality is that they are bombarded by a wide range of opportunities to learn, in some instances to learn negative things and get misinformation about disease and their situation.”
The AHA has been developing daily, weekly and monthly plans of care to form a health care relationship with patients that can be exhibited through health technologies, Wayte said, noting some health topics that are addressed in this approach include cardiac rehabilitation, HF and atrial fibrillation. The initiative also focuses on issues that go beyond science such as social determinants of health, environments that patients are experiencing, behavioral and personality factors and how to personalize the information that is generated from health technology, he said.
“Certainly, as we think about measures coming out of these systems, solutions, [applications] or whatever they may be, fundamentally we’re looking for key improvements in health,” Wayte said during the presentation.
Date: October 14, 2019
Source: Healio