Parks Associates’ continues its ninth-annual Connected Health Summit: Consumer Engagement and Innovation with the virtual session, Telehealth and Remote Monitoring: Health to Home Thursday, March 24, from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM CT. Karsten Russell-Wood, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer at Equum Medical will be speaking on the panel Expanding Virtual Care Models at 1:30 PM. This panel will cover the High levels of consumer demand for connected health devices point to a growing interest in health data and actionable insights among consumers as well. Consumers want to be able to access this data and share it with their care providers. This stands to substantially boost the remote patient monitoring model. This session brings together industry leaders to share their perspectives on virtual care models and how healthcare is delivered now and in the future.

What do you consider to be one of the key trends impacting healthcare and the connected home?

Karsten Russell-Wood:  A growing trend is Health Citizenship. This is a concept that speaks to the growing knowledge of consumers and patients about healthcare, programs and policy and the growing interest to participate because of rising share of wallet costs of healthcare, and the introduction of consumer level telehealth which allows for greater convenience to access care. As healthcare becomes more consumerized, the tenets of convenience that have shifted how our life operations function – from brick and mortar to click and mortar banking, retail shopping and work – now are impacting our attitudes to personal health.

How have the latest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the connected health market? What short-term and long-term implications do you perceive?

Karsten Russell-Wood: Health systems have long invested in a centralized “Field of Dreams” infrastructure model where if “we build it they will come” – namely patients travel to a central site for care. COVID has dramatically shifted this in person and centralized model as we saw surge limiting capacity and risk of infection reducing ER access and elective surgeries. Hospitals have innovated in virtual-first strategies to extend hospital grade health care into the home, and with that progressive policies like Acute@Home have been a tailwind to increase the pace of venue transitions to the home. This is very encouraging and signals a patient centric realization of where patients want to be cared for—which is healing in the home, not hospital. Connected devices that achieve that same caliber of data integrity as those found in hospitals are growing in adoption through dedicated programs that focus on managing “venue-less” acuity—taking patients that historically were too sick for out of hospital care and bringing that to the home. Secondly connected health care has excited innovation in equity of care access for populations across the country, as care is enabled to be local.

As the use of telehealth and other virtual care services grows, what challenges do you expect providers to face and what opportunities are there to embrace?

Karsten Russell-Wood: We can anticipate that the greater generation of digital patient data will exhaust clinical interpretation and therefore there is increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence tools that can help us scale together as connected device adoption increases. Data, its ability to be interoperable, connected, and interpretable for action/ intervention will be the most significant challenge to keep pace.

Sponsored by ADT Medical Alert, Alarm.com, EarlySense, Rapid Response Monitoring, and Independa, Connected Health Summit addresses the impact of connected devices and IoT healthcare technologies on consumers as they seek more in-home health solutions. Register now to attend the in-person conference in September and virtual sessions throughout 2022:

• January 20: Health and Home: State of the Market
• March 24: Telehealth and Remote Monitoring: Health to Home
• June 16: Smart Home and Health: Modern Living
• October 6: Seniors and Caretakers: Living Independently