A patient-centered medical car?

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO

The future of healthcare, as envisioned by the Beacon Community program, accountable care organizational (ACO) models and telemedicine initiatives, among others, depends on multiple access points for data as well as care teams.

These access points will enable patients to provide their caregivers with the information they need to manage patient health and deliver care when and where it's needed. Panelists and keynote speakers celebrated the first year of the Beacon program this week, and these access points were part of the conversation. Care teams and streamlined data exchange will also power the Pioneer ACOs for which CMS is now accepting applications.

Amid the discussion of data delivery from anywhere, news arrived yesterday that caught my eye. It announced that Ford and WellDoc are partnering on research to integrate WellDoc's diabetes management services into Ford vehicles, “transforming the car into an access point that delivers health management content to patients in a safe, targeted and supportive manner.”

The project will demonstrate how adults with type 2 diabetes can manage their disease using the WellDoc diabetes management system combined with Ford’s voice-activated in-car connectivity system. People with diabetes will be able to enter data such as medications, exercise and diet information via speech-to-text interaction while in their vehicle, the release stated.

This raises interesting privacy and security questions. Can data can be exchanged securely from the road? Will the FDA classify cars as networked medical devices subject to HIPAA requirements? Two recent reports from HHS' Office of the Inspector General (OIG) took CMS and the ONC to task for not doing enough to safeguard electronic protected health information. CMS has not consistently enforced privacy protections while ONC isn't addressing privacy and security at the health IT standards level, according to the OIG.   

Real-time in-vehicle health management services might not arrive for a while, but if and when they do, this combination of mobile health, patient accountability and an actual dashboard could help manage chronic disease. Maybe we can't drive our way to health, but if we're behind the wheel and stuck in traffic, it might be healthier to discuss blood sugar levels with a care provider than to holler at our slow-moving fellow drivers.

On a final note, if your organization is one of the recipients of CMS' first Medicare EHR incentive payments, which were to be issued this week, I'd like to hear from you. You can contact me at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.
 
Mary Stevens, editor