On Monday and Tuesday of next week, I’ll be at the 2007 Symposium, Building the Connected Health Economy, which has quite an impressive line-up of presenters and round-tables that touch upon a variety of topics related to healthcare technology. Particular emphasis is on telemedicine – not all that surprising as the organizers are also key members of the industry consortium, Continua Alliance. With well over 600 registrants (received the list this morning), it looks to be quite an interesting event.
What I’ll be particularly interested to learn more about is the confluence of IT, medical devices and home care. Microsoft is certainly looking to address this issue with the release of HealthVault and its Connection Center within the HealthVault platform for medical device connectivity. I only briefly touched upon this is my review of HealthVault. The folks over at Medical Connection have provided a much more detailed overview on what the Connection Center actually does and its implications within the medical device sector. An interesting point they make is that for all of Microsoft’s professions of the openness of HealthVault, Microsoft today is not a part of the Continua Alliance. Curious, but then again, we are talking about Microsoft here.
I also recently attended a local event that included presentations from a small company here in Massachusetts, Dovetail Health and Masonicare, a Masons nonprofit that is providing elderly care in Connecticut. Both organizations are leveraging telemedicine in some innovative ways for long-term care outside the hospital. This is one area that we’ll see a lot of growth in the years to come as that baby boomer bubble starts to burst. Also, in most cases this is a more effective and efficient way to provide care for the chronically ill and I’d argue, much more humane.
Hope to provide updates on the event (praying they’ll have WiFi), so check back later on Monday and Tuesday.
Till then…
Go Red Sox!
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