In-Depth: All the News from the Connected Health Conference 2016

This week, the Connected Health Conference in National Harbor, Maryland brought together stakeholders and thought leaders in digital and connected health. MobiHealthNews covered the two-day event this week -- links to our coverage from Monday and Tuesday are at the bottom of this roundup... In a panel moderated by Dr. Joe Kvedar, the VP of Connected Health at Partner’s Healthcare, Alden Doerner Rinaldi, medical director at Mount Auburn Hospital and Ronan Wisdom, global lead for connected health at Accenture, talked about how the role of digital tools is changing in healthcare.

“What’s really interesting is the evolution of digital assets that were first intended as a complement to a therapy and the evolution of those to now have therapeutic value by themselves, and for some to a place where there’s no chemical element involved,” Wisdom said. “… What we think of as a therapeutical product is really changing and it’s an evolution to some mix of chemical, biological, and digital.” Rinaldi added that getting doctors to accept digital tools will depend on introducing them in a way that maintains the fundamental humanity of the profession.

“I think there’s a lot of anxiety among physicians that somehow digital health and the art of medicine are opposed or in tension,” he said. “But I think, not just in healthy patients but in people dealing with chronic illness, technology and the art of medicine can be collapsed. And it just requires careful attention to design. … How do you enable our digital health technologies to develop this extra level of not just biological but psycho-social data, and team them up for the most authentic types of healing relationships?”...