Medtech Silos are an Interoperability Challenge in Virtual Care

The need for social distancing among physicians and patients drove tele-consultations through the roof during the pandemic. But national healthcare systems were unable to automate the collection of patient generated health data (PGHD) from elderly confined patients who were most at risk. The next wave of telehealth will need to fix the device integration into modern virtual care platforms in order to enable the Hospital@Home.
 
Personal health devices relying on a consumer smartphone have been designed to monetize data and are hard to integrate into health IT systems because they operate in silos. As long as they require manual pairing, they will never support health equity or address privacy concerns (GDPR, HIPAA). It’s time to put the Internet of Things (IoT) to work for care teams in remote patient monitoring (RPM) and decentralized clinical trials (DCT).