Mobile monitoring in healthcare

I saw this article on monitoring diabetes in the Arizona Republic. This use of mobile technology to continuously monitor patients in a home/office/non-medical setting is going to be big trend in the coming years. I know of other companies using a similar continuous monitoring approach to heart disease for instance.

What all this medical monitoring will rapidly show, however, is the need for automated decisioning in healthcare. If a doctor must watch every data feed from every patient, this will not help much. If, on the other hand, medical professionals can set rules about when actions should be taken (send an ambulance, get a nurse to call, use an automated system to check up onthem) based both on evidence-based medicine guidelines and their unique knowledge of the specific patient, then great scalability can be achieved along with better patient care and a better quality of life for patients. This topic is coming up more and more and has appeared on the blog - see this post on mobile devices in healthcare or this health data management webinar or this podcast. A number of these include a description of Kiwok, the heart-monitoring company I mentioned.

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