I’m often asked to engage at conferences with thought leaders and innovators. This year, I’ll take a moment and share some thoughts from road after some of these events. While I usually examine a few key trends at the top of each year from the year prior, it’s interesting to watch them emerging in real time.
I consider CES 2020 to be one of the world’s most influential tech trade shows, and this year there were over 300 sessions brimming with emerging technologies. Sadly, I could not attend the conference this year, but I followed the coverage of it closely and viewed many of the sessions remotely. I want to share some highlights to pique your imagination about what is becoming possible in 2020.
Healthcare tech was focused on wearables, and they are undeniably going to change the way we live and the care we receive. From devices we wear, to our phones and in-home devices, there is a tremendous drive to make healthcare easier to consume without patients having to go to the physician.
The tech coming from the showroom floor was pushing the edge of how to drive wellness, improve physical therapy, and get in front of and grow effectiveness in preventative care. From robotics to VR, voice recognition to AI-driven avatars that build patient or member engagement, the future state of healthcare is undeniably tied to technology that puts the person at the center of the mix. And that’s good, because given the rapidly escalating cost of chronic care in terms of human condition and GDP, we have to get in front of what we can and approach healthcare from a wellness perspective, rather than waiting for the illness-based approach.
Some of my specific favorites this year are in the field of personalized healthcare technology. As medical devices continue converging with mobile, amongst other disrupting technologies, there are organizations such as ADD-Care, makers of Glutrac. Glutrac uses sensors to monitor blood glucose levels in a completely non-invasive way, and can drive alerts directly to yourself, family members, or even to your patient record. This is just one of many to keep an eye on from the event.
Thanks to public cloud, mobile devices that don’t have to run on operating systems on the back end are becoming prevalent, making us all more agile and innovative as they connect via wifi to unstructured, encrypted databases or serverless platforms that can move data and update services on the end-user’s device.
But, not to burst the technology bubble, as promising as all of these new devices and the technology that powers them are, medical devices–or the IoMT–still need to be wrapped tight in better privacy, security, and compliance. It’s a highly regulated industry, and I’ll be talking more about that this year, along with GxP frameworks and the ways we can build cloud infrastructures and automation to help protect PHI so these technologies can change the way we live.
Here are some of the many pieces of coverage from the event I found most interesting. It’s going to be an exciting year in healthcare IT! Happy reading…
CNET: The Most Important Health Devices to Know About from CES 2020
FierceHealthcare: Industry Leaders Share Their Big Takeaways on CES 2020
FierceHealthcare: At CES, Humana Offers a Glimpse Inside its new Digital Tech Hub ‘Studio H”
Stat: At CES, Digital Health Gadgets Gave me a Detailed Accounting of my Flaws and Failures
Mobile Health News: The Devices, Software and Other Health Tech Headlines of CES 2020
