GrandCare’s VP of Business Development, Laura Mitchell was a panelist on the “Point-of-Care Everywhere” track at the Digital Health Summit during last week’s CES in Las Vegas.

Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare moderated the discussion on trends in mobile health technology and the process of moving healthcare out of more traditional clinical settings to patients on the move and in their homes. Additional panelists included Walter De Brouwer of Scanadu Inc., Nersi Nazari of Vital Connect, and Yasmine Winkler of UnitedHealthcare.

CES: Mobile health has a lot of power, but it’s raw and new

[…] It’s an uphill battle for sure to sell certain healthcare organizations on new technology. Laura Mitchell, VP of business development at GrandCare Systems, maker of communication and monitoring systems for independent living, said that some long-term-care providers see the West Bend, Wis.-based company as a competitor rather than a useful service.

“We’re sort of the baby monitor but we’re not the mom,” said Mitchell. It is GrandCare’s job to deliver useful, actionable information—with as little “noise” as possible—to caregivers. The caregiver needs to be able to act on the information GrandCare delivers, but the vendor needs to eliminate “noise” in data.

Information should be in the form of “constant reminders,” integrated into the lives of patients and their caregivers, Mitchell said.

This sounds simple, but it so far has not been. Kvedar said that Wellocracy, a social community for health that the Center for Connected Health spun out and launched at CES last year, still searching for its audience.

However, he is optimistic, given the changes going on in healthcare and the merging of institutional and consumer technologies. Despite the rocky rollout of HealthCare.gov, Kvedar said that health insurance exchanges are a “powerful force for engaging consumers.” Kvedar acknowledged that these exchanges are about connecting people to insurance coverage, not managing health conditions, but he said that they at least start people thinking, perhaps for the first time, about being consumers in the healthcare segment.

New payment models that reward outcomes rather than value also are driving growth in nontraditional care settings, plus, as Kvedar illustrated with the smartphone “addiction” example, consumers – all of whom are potential patients – are already so familiar with so many technologies on display at the massive CES show this week.

Read the full article at by Neil Versel at http://mobihealthnews.com/28673/ces-mobile-health-has-a-lot-of-power-but-its-raw-and-new/