Oct 24 2009
“Living .vs. Aging” – CTIA Wireless by Jason Kim
As I was waiting for the conference room door to be opened, I spyed out few sail boats on the distant horizons and my thoughts wondered off to the times when I came down to San Diego for a sailboat racing long ago. I recalled of my old conversation with one of my coworker who bought a house with large lots in San Diego, so that he would retire early and raise horses and grow vegitable garden. …
The session opened with pannel discussion moderator, Emilio Pardo – Chief Brand Officer of AARP, stating the US sensus statistics that only 10% of the baby boomers are retiring early at age 60, thus the need for better health for living longer versus extending the life of aging population is of our concerns. In light of the current congressional debate about the escalating cost of medical services, what can we the technologists do to help the aging population?
Dr. Jeremy Lowell, the owner and operator of Gold Gym, noted that more and more elderly clients come to his Gym these days to get fit, consequenlty, his usually young Trainers (unprepared for medical emergency) are inadvertantly becoming the caretakers of elderly patients. Unfortunately, because current US healthcare insurance companies do not reimberse for preventive healthcare expenses, it is difficult him to hire Trainers with medical knowledge.
Mr. Don Jones, the VP of Health and Life Sicence at Qualcom chaimed in saying that the US healthcare systems should move away from current reimbersement policy of rewarding the treatments, because it effectively rewards the sick instead of well. With the reimbersement policy favoring the “well-care” instead of “sick-care” there would be more opportunities for “wellness” technologies – such as an active patient monitoring system that would work like a “band-aid” to allow preventive care. This would help us to control the escalating healthcare costs, because the preventive care cast would take the least amount of money for the industry while keeping the population healthy.
Mr. Pardo than asked about the current debates concerning the need of keeping electronic health records versus the need for personal privacy. To these, Mr. Jones responded by saying that controlled subject studies showed that people were actually more concerned about their medical data being used against them for getting insurance than keeping them private. In this study, he mentioned that the controlled group of people who had strong opinion for keeping their medical record private, were given an option for a medical treatment which would give them great benefits to their health, but the catch was that their medical records had to be made public. After weighing the benefits, all these chose to take the treatment instead.
Dr. Jeremy Lowell also responded by saying that his Gym members prefered to use their heart rate monitor data public and use them to motivate one another in competitive spirit of excercising more to keeping their heart rates lowere than the others doing the same level of excercise. This, he believes is the positive motivational use of fitness data for the well beings of the people. Sadly, current set of devices can not share these data beyond the boundaries of their products, so the extend of their influence is limited.
Mr. Jones also pointed out that the incompetible medical data system is also the current situation for the healthcare community. There is no common starandard way of sharing the records, instead, current electronic medical record is nothing but a disjointed scanned images of paper records – therefore the benefits of data mining for improving healthcare procedure is minimal. For this he suggested that the CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid System) should mandate a stanard electronics data filing for reimbersements. This should force industry to come up with solutions that will allow information sharing.
Near the end of the session, one of the audience asked the question, where does all these fit with the topic our our discussion, “Living .vs. Aging” ? The answer seems to be that the “Living” requires the promotion of “wellness” whereas the “Aging” promotes the extening of life over “sickness”. I personally thought that our choice would be obvious and the healthcare insurance system could be used to promote the “Living” by the use of tried-and-true “Carrot and Stick” to “Wellness” policy.
Jason Kim