The Washington Post has a story today trumpeting what I call Always-On Medical applications while Techdirt pooh-poohs it (because doctors don’t e-mail).
Naturally the Posts’ hook is that some big companies — Honeywell and Philips — are getting into the market. (They never said a word when it was all start-ups.) They seem especially excited about the TV hook-ups which are part of these systems. (Actually, the story in question is actually from The Wall Street Journal (which explains a lot), rescued from behind that paper’s paid firewall.)
In fact, what we’re looking at here is bloatware aimed not at patients but at insurance companies. Instead of spending $800/day for near-critical care, they trumpet, push the patients out the door with $150/month boxes as big as TV trolleys. Rii-i-i-ight.
Real Always-On medical monitoring can be much, much simpler and much, much smaller. Sensors can be the size of a single chip. They can be embedded in clothing. They can be made for pennies. Their signals can ride on 802.11 networks to a standard PC for analysis and storage. The alerts can ride the cellular network.
And here’s the part that no one gets.
AJAX.
By combining software with XML tags on data (Java + XML = AJAX), you greatly minimize the
traffic load, you do more of the analysis at-home, and you give the
people monitoring back at base a much better view of the resulting
data, without taking up a lot of bandwidth.
I have said, and continue to assert, that Always-On medical monitoring
can and should be a mass market. As we age, and the conditions our
parents left us with becoming increasingly distracting (as well as
increasingly threatening) we can use the data sensors bring us ourselves to
make quick adjustments (eat a little, take a pill) that can save our
lives, or at least avoid an ambulance trip to the hospital.
This is where the big savings are. This is where the big market should be.
Yet the media is nowhere near this story.
All medical innovations are slowed by the same thing — fear of litigation. The same reason it takes new vaccines and treatments so long to become commercially available is behind the delay in medical always-on. Whether or not this is a bad thing is hard to say. It is very hard to get a properly engineered solution built when accounting comes into the picture. How do you justify fault tolerance in a product? If you do a risk analysis you will see the economics are often better to leave it out and pay the price once the thing fails. If the Republicans that want to reform the civil courts have their way, it will probably speed always-on medical to the market, but get ready for all the horror stories about when the products fail and people die. Of course, the 99% of people who are helped will not make any headlines.
All medical innovations are slowed by the same thing — fear of litigation. The same reason it takes new vaccines and treatments so long to become commercially available is behind the delay in medical always-on. Whether or not this is a bad thing is hard to say. It is very hard to get a properly engineered solution built when accounting comes into the picture. How do you justify fault tolerance in a product? If you do a risk analysis you will see the economics are often better to leave it out and pay the price once the thing fails. If the Republicans that want to reform the civil courts have their way, it will probably speed always-on medical to the market, but get ready for all the horror stories about when the products fail and people die. Of course, the 99% of people who are helped will not make any headlines.
I invent medical devices and shouldn’t be giving this stuff for free, but it is tough to stay silent when I see giant healthcare organizations building business plans on costly, proprietary technology when we are continuously innovating remote computing and connectivity in the commercial vein.
Dana is spot on with his analysis and if that is not enough of a clue to the “next big thing” in medical devices you ain’t paying attention. Or you ought to call me.
I invent medical devices and shouldn’t be giving this stuff for free, but it is tough to stay silent when I see giant healthcare organizations building business plans on costly, proprietary technology when we are continuously innovating remote computing and connectivity in the commercial vein.
Dana is spot on with his analysis and if that is not enough of a clue to the “next big thing” in medical devices you ain’t paying attention. Or you ought to call me.