Nancy Green, Managing Principal, Verizon Healthcare, Verizon Enterprise Solutions shares her insights at the Connected Health Summit: Engaging Consumers. Nancy spoke on the "Independent Living: Engaging the Elderly and Caregivers" panel at the 2014 event.

What is the most important next step for healthcare providers to engage consumers in digital health solutions?
Providers must invest in solutions that meet the consumer from their lifestyle perspective that makes it convenient, fun, and affordable. Getting patients to adopt digital solutions is going to first require the provider community to be willing to invest in the platforms behind those mobile/digital solutions. They also have to be willing to put in the time and money integrating those solutions into their treatment and tracking workflows. Once you get provider buy-in, the next big hurdle will be incentivizing their patients to use them, which is going to require providers to create entirely new models for care and engagement. If physician-driven PHRs taught us anything, you can’t send a patient home with a link and hope they use it. We’re learning that in the remote monitoring space as well. You don’t just give someone a wireless BP cuff and have all the data flow into a black hole that you never look at and don’t use.

What will be the biggest impact for consumers as a result of digital health solutions?
The drivers for most of these digital solutions are going to still be cost, convenience, and compliance. A greater ability to manage their care and their families care from a cost/quality perspective. With greater transparency of cost and options for care available, consumers can better customize their care based on their lifestyle needs and value return.

What will be the biggest driver for digital health market?
Advanced connectivity coupled with sound mobile strategies that enable persistent engagement of technologies throughout the day – connected home, car, office through smart devices. As consumers become more accustom to devices as their lifestyle partners with the convergence of analytics delivering more relevant and consumable information to the end-user, the digital health market will grow.