Telehealth Conference Spotlights Innovation, Disruptive Technology

When all is said and done, the advancement of telehealth and mobile health in the United States will be accomplished through the percolation of innovation.

In a city known for its coffee, that was one of the central themes of the first day of the Institute for Health Technology Transformation’s Seattle summit, titled "Unleashing the Power of mHealth and Telemedicine." The two-day conference, concluding Tuesday, brought together more than 100 healthcare executives from around the country to discuss such issues as cloud computing, mobile health strategies to improve clinical outcomes, accelerating the adoption of mobile health projects and whether mobile health and telehealth could be considered disruptive technologies.

Among the speakers sharing the stage was Bill Spooner, chief information officer for San Diego-based Sharp Healthcare. Spooner ran through a lengthy list of telehealth and mHealth-related projects that the award-winning health system has undertaken, pointing out that many of the new processes developed at Sharp were the result not of new technologies, but of “smart uses” of existing technology...