In a panel entitled Connected Health, hosted by Politico and Philips North America, guest speakers discussed their experiences implementing health IT into the existing health care infrastructure, and the difficulty of getting private practices to change their routine.

Today more than ninety percent of hospitals in the United States utilize electronic health records, but only ten years ago the majority of doctors were still keeping handwritten records.

Dr. Karen B. DeSalvo, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was a witness to the health care crisis that ensued after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the ways in which that crisis propelled electronic records to the forefront of the health care conversation.
"We had a town and state with the worst quality of care at the highest cost in the country. So we were a poster child for lowering cost and improving health for everyone," says DeSalvo. "But that wasn't enough impetus for change. It had to get real for people. Many physicians came back [after the hurricane] and wanted to do better. Unprecedented and unusual partnerships formed between municipal government and academic boundaries."

Dr. David C. Gordon, who has twenty years of experience with the University of Virginia's groundbreaking Office of Telemedicine, also knows firsthand what it takes to make a difference. He and his colleagues estimate they've saved patients a total of 8.9 million miles of travel by bringing health care to rural communities through telemedicine. He stressed the misconception that technology dehumanizes medicine, stating that when innovation is correctly implemented, "the technology dissolves and the [patient-physician] relationship emerges."

The tools for change

Other panelists described specific devices that could further increase efficiency today. Chase Feiger, founder of Wearable Intelligence, a company in partnership with Google Glass, said this technology allows doctors to receive updates without relying on a central panel. If a patient's blood results come back, for example, the physician is automatically notified. This expedites treatment and eliminates redundancies, such as checking for results and discovering they haven't arrived yet.

"Wearable Intelligence takes visual data, static data, and telemetric data, and puts it all on a platform that simplifies it for the end user," said Feiger. "A physician now has the ability to walk into a patient's room and get the information that she or he actually needs to treat the patient. What are the allergies? What are the medications? &emdash; without having to fish endlessly through an electronic health record, because it's right there on their face."

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