Dan Pettus Consulting 2012

Wireless Enabled Health

Convergence or Collision?

Mobile Health

In the home, hospital, or clinic, medical devices provide an important therapeutic function. They are also valuable sources of information about treatment patterns at the point of care. These devices have been independent islands of valuable information, unable to share the data they gather with surveillance or therapeutic information resources.

Home Health

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Mobile medical devices move from place to place as independent actors, raising a series of security and identification issues when they need to be disconnected and reconnected using traditional tethered cables. Wireless health provides the promise of a mobile and connected care coordination for patients but the lack of standards and misuse of current consumer grade standards has made integration a complex and ad hoc solution at best.

We Can Help

Dan Pettus Consulting is uniquely positioned in wireless health offering the depth and breadth to solve real world problems with real world solutions.   Contact us for a consulting interview.

We will miss Steve

Certainly, hospitals could use the Jobs touch. In a stunning eulogy, Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson recounted how an intubated Jobs asked for a sketchpad in the ICU. “He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment,” she said. “He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.”

Hospitals could use someone to stitch all the gadgets together, and make it all perfect. The hospital where Jobs was has had every bit as much technological innovation over the past thirty years as the computer industry. But much more of that innovation has been technical, and hard to understand, and only physicians and surgeons can grasp it. And we don’t reward it as much as a society: unlike in tech, little of the money in medicine goes to the actual innovator. There are 50% more billionaires from tech than from health care, and they are far richer. This has to stunt medical innovation – although it is still progressing at an amazing pace, which gave Jobs extra chances at life. Isaacson reports Jobs had his genome sequenced, in the hopes of finding the targeted cancer drugs that would kill his specific tumor.

© FORBES; Matthew Herper