The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine

Leveraging Innovation, Seizing Opportunities and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth

Paul Cerrato, John Halamka

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780128149232
• eBook ISBN: 9780128149249
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology & Healthcare Industry

The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine: Leveraging Innovation, Seizing Opportunities, and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth addresses the rapid advances taking place in mHealth and their impact on clinicians and patients. It provides guidance on reliable mobile health apps that are based on sound scientific evidence, while also offering advice on how to stay clear of junk science. The book explores the latest developments, including the value of blockchain, the emerging growth of remote sensors in chronic patient care, the potential use of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant as patient bedside assistants, the use of Amazon's IoT button, and much more.This book enables physicians and nurses to gain a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of mobile health and helps them choose evidence-based mobile medicine tools to improve patient care.- Provides clinicians and technologists with an update on the latest mobile health initiatives and tools, including the work done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School- Encompasses case studies with real-world examples to turn abstract concepts into flesh and blood examples of how mHealth benefits the public- Presents drawings, graphics and flow charts to help readers visualize the functionality and value of mobile medicine

Chapter One

Innovations in mHealth, Part 1

The Role of Blockchain, Conversational Interfaces, and Chatbots

Abstract

Innovation in health care involves the novel use of people, process, and technologies to improve quality, safety, and efficiency. Among the emerging innovations in mobile health are blockchain initiatives—including MedRec—conversational interfaces, such as Alexa, Google Now, and Siri, and chatbots, such as Woebot. This chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these digital tools and how technology can be used in the service of altruism.

Keywords

Alexa; blockchain; health-care innovation; MedRec; Woebot; mobile health apps; mHealth; Paul Cerrato; John Halamka; encryption; ambient digital assistants; machine learning; BIDMC

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines innovation as “the introduction of something new.” A better definition would be the novel use of people, process, and technologies to improve quality, safety, and efficiency. Unfortunately, not everyone is eager to embrace such novel improvements. In fact, history is replete with decision makers and influential stakeholders who have resisted such changes.

The Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, recommended antiseptic handwashing in the mid-19th century and was ridiculed for his ideas. The use of incubators for premature infants was also rejected by the US medical authorities in the late 19th century, despite the fact that they were being successfully used in Europe for years. It wasn’t until 1939 that New York Hospital started a program that incorporated incubators into American hospitals. Similarly, the germ theory of disease, balloon angioplasty, the role of heredity in human health and disease, and the role of sports-induced traumatic brain injury have all been laughed at or delayed by “thought leaders” who had difficulty seeing past their outdated views [1].

The same resistance to innovation exists in technology. Dr. Frederick Terman, former Provost of Stanford University, did foundational work in radio engineering, including the creation of novel amplifier circuits. But when presented with a tiny integrated circuit that did the work of his most complex radio engineering designs at a fraction of the cost, he couldn’t understand the technology inside the device and therefore had no interest in it. Similarly, Doris Lessing, when accepting her Nobel Prize, insisted that the Internet was destroying creativity and intelligence because it enabled anyone to be a publisher and removed the rigorous training in the history of literature as a barrier to authorship. Terman and Lessing made invaluable contributions to society but both also had blind spots they could not see past [2].

It’s not surprising to find that resistance to new ideas exists within a health-care community still using an outdated “operating system,” so to speak. Joseph Kvedar, MD, of Partners Connected Health, sums up the problem succinctly: “The current health-care system—which is based on early twentieth century needs—is a serious mismatch for the challenges we are confronting in the twenty-first century.” [3]. Today’s system has been built around the need to manage infectious diseases, fractures, myocardial infarctions, and other acute problems. While it may be true that these conditions still require attention, the American public’s health care needs are experiencing a major shift as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, clinical depression, and other chronic diseases become more prominent. As Kvedar points out:

The usual practice of writing a prescription for a drug, advising a patient to ‘lose weight and get more exercise,’ or expecting an individual to successfully follow a recommended diet plan just doesn’t work. People need ongoing and consistent support from advisors and authority figures… The right text at the right time, a thoughtful email or televisit from a doctor or medical coach, or a phone call from a nurse monitoring personal health data recorded by the patient sitting at home can prevent a potential problem from spiralling into an expensive and potentially dangerous medical issue.

Embracing new health-care digital tools also means acknowledging the inadequacy of the current way of doing business, a difficult admission for organizations and individuals with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Clinicians and decision makers who are willing to venture beyond the constraints of the past can take advantage of several mobile technologies that hold promise, including blockchain, conversational interfaces, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, Internet of Things devices, chatbots, and a variety of inventive tools. Many of these tools will help us shift the emphasis away from episodic care of acute health problems while at the same time improving care coordination, patient activation, and preventive care.

Blockchain

There are several emerging technologies that are challenging the status quo and helping patients and clinicians forge more productive relationships. One of the goals of these technologies is to help patients gain control of their medical data, to become “masters of their destiny” as it were. Blockchain is one such tool.

No doubt the term will sound cryptic to clinicians who have not kept pace with recent developments in information technology.¹ Blockchain is essentially a chain of data blocks or packages, each containing patient information. This collection of data is linked or chained together and listed in a master ledger that patients and providers have access to. But the actual packages of information are not housed together in one location, they are distributed across many computer networks. For instance, one block might be all the data on Ms. Jones located in the electronic health record (EHR) system at the hospital she was recently discharged from. A second block might be all the notes in her physical therapist’s office that discuss her rehab exercises, a third the records at her local pharmacy. These and several other data sources are physically located in different digital repositories but can be linked together in a distributed network, with Ms. Jones having access to all the information through a digital ledger that keeps track of everything.

Blockchain technology offers several advantages over more traditional approaches to patient data storage and distribution. Patients have more of a say in how and when their data is used, the data is immutable, which means it can’t be altered, and it’s more secure. And each person or organization with access to the information sees a comprehensive picture of the patient’s journey through the health-care maze.

Comprehensive is the operative word here as the chain of data entries presents a total picture of the patient’s interaction with providers. When properly implemented, a system like this will prevent needless duplication of medical tests and reduce the danger that presents itself when one clinician is unaware of what another clinician is prescribing. A medication prescription blockchain can literally be a lifesaving tool. In the current environment, hospitals, primary-care physicians in ambulatory practice, and specialists may all be prescribing different medications without knowledge of the interactions that can occur among them. This is no hypothetical threat: one of us (John Halamka) lost his grandmother to hemorrhagic stroke brought on when one of her providers ordered high-dose ibuprofen and another prescribed steroids. The combination caused severe gastric bleeding, which in turn precipitated hypertension and stroke.

Several blockchain initiatives have emerged recently. One of the most promising in the health-care section is MedRec, which was developed by data scientists at the MIT Media Lab [4,5]. Ariel Ekblaw and Asaf Azaria describe the tool this way:

Our MedRec prototype enables patients with one-stop-shop access to their medical history across multiple providers: smart contracts on an Ethereum blockchain aggregate data pointers (references to medical records that are stored elsewhere) into “patient-provider relationships.” These contract data structures are stored on the blockchain and associate references to disparate medical data with ownership and viewership permissions and record retrieval location. This provides an immutable data-lifecycle log, enabling later auditing. We include a cryptographic hash of the record in the smart contract to establish a baseline of the original content and thus provide a check against content tampering. The raw medical record content is never stored on the blockchain, but rather kept securely in providers’ existing data storage infrastructure.

MedRec facilitates reviewing, sharing and posting of new records via a flexible user interface, designed to reflect best-practices from the Blue Button health record competition. We abstract away the blockchain technology to focus on usability for the medical record use case. The interface includes a notifications system to alert users when a new record has been posted on their behalf or shared with them.

In practical terms, this technology can spring into action when a clinician inputs a new record into the MedRec provider app, as illustrated in Fig. 1.1. The record—a new antibiotic prescription, for instance—is stored in the provider organization’s database—the server for its EHR system, for example. At the same time a reference to the record is listed in the blockchain through an open source, publicly distributed computing platform called Ethereum. The patient record can also be downloaded to the MedRec patient app, which in turn allows the patient to view the details on the antibiotic prescription. He or she can also gain access to a list of all the other medical records that have been logged in the blockchain through the custom Ethereum client and MedRec application program interfaces.²

Figure 1.1 The diagram shows a single node in the MedRec blockchain. This would be replicated across many provider/patient pairings, which would give MedRec the potential to connect patients to their data across many silos. No raw medical data would be stored in the blockchain itself. Fig. 1.2 illustrates a multi-node model, which shows how the single node would operate in context. Ekbkaw A. MedRec: blockchain for medical data access, permission management and trend analysis. DSpace@MIT. <https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/109658> [accessed 13.10.17], Used with permission of author.

MedRec contains a feature called smart contracts, which let users develop relationships—for instance, an agreed upon sharing relationship between clinicians and patients who have access to the medical data. The contracts “automate and track certain state transitions (such as a change in viewership rights, or the birth of a new record in the system). Via smart contracts on an Ethereum blockchain, we log patient-provider relationships that associate a medical record with viewing permissions and data retrieval instructions (essentially data pointers) for execution on external databases.” [6].

Figure 1.2 This multi-node model illustrates how several individual blockchain nodes in MedRec work together to allow patients and clinicians to gain access to medical records across several provider organizations. Ekbkaw A. MedRec: blockchain for medical data access, permission management and trend analysis. DSpace@MIT. <https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/109658> [accessed 13.10.17], Used with permission of author.

System Architecture for MedRec

Many thought leaders in health-care IT see the value of blockchain technology. In fact, its potential is so promising that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services, launched a contest to encourage innovative uses of blockchain in health care. Over 70 contestants submitted entries, of which 15 were declared winners. In addition to MIT’s MedRec, other winners included entries from Deloitte Consulting, the National Quality Forum, Accenture, University of California San Diego, Mayo Clinic, the Institute for the Future, as well several unaffiliated persons [7].

Like all emerging technologies, blockchain has its strengths and weaknesses. Security is one of its strengths. The sensitive data in an electronic medical record, for instance, can be stored in an encrypted form using public key cryptography and then unlocked with a private key. In plain English, that refers to the use of algorithms to convert the plaintext contained in a patient’s record into ciphertext that looks li...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Chapter One. Innovations in mHealth, Part 1: The Role of Blockchain, Conversational Interfaces, and Chatbots
• Chapter Two. Innovations in mHealth, Part 2: Electronic Health Record–Linked Apps, Remote Patient Monitoring, and the Internet of Things
• Chapter Three. Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Mobile Health Apps
• Chapter Four. Mobile Apps: Heart Disease, Hypertension, and Atrial Fibrillation
• Chapter Five. A Mobile Approach to Diabetes and Asthma
• Chapter Six. Mental Health
• Chapter Seven. Reinventing Clinical Decision Support: What Role for Mobile Technology?
• Chapter Eight. Telemedicine: Is It Good Patient Care?
• Chapter Nine. Patient Engagement: Our Top Priority
• Chapter Ten. Mobile Security
• Chapter Eleven. Designing Mobile Health Apps
• Index