Connected Health: Integrating health and pop culture

BOSTON--The University of Southern California (USC) is taking advantage of mobile health and social media to advance medicine, said Leslie Saxon, MD, chief of cardiovascular medicine, who spoke during Partners HealthCare’s 10th Annual Connected Health Symposium.

For example, Saxon said there were 100,000 declared organ donors as of May 2012 but 7,000 to 10,000 patients per year die waiting for a suitable transplant. By setting up a Facebook page, the organization garnered 23 times greater surge of online state donor registries.

In the future, Saxon said she sees “a Facebook of medicine with other ruthlessly efficient tools” hardwired into phones and repurposed many different ways.

She also sees more and more use of biometrics. “The digital ecosystem is ready;” the question is how to engage. “A lot of mobile health is engineering driven. Many people are investing in the engineering side but they need to invest on the engagement side. “There is no more engaging story than your own healthcare story. The issue is determining what will make it sticky for people.”

Patients have a great appetite for medical content, Saxon said, and want it integrated into their rest of their lives, including news, sports and community.

At USC’s Center for Body Computing, she and her team have studied body worn sensors on the school’s Division I athletes both to enhance performance and to try to understand risk and prevent injuries. These are semi-professional athletes who are also students interested in finding their peak performance zone for both the field and the classroom. “The insight you can gain from these continuous collections is pretty remarkable,” Saxon said.

These findings also impact soldiers on the battlefield. “It’s important when you’re working on a team to figure out which person is in the zone and understand the factors that constitute resiliency.”

For an integrated, digital, continuous health experience, the car is a good place to investigate advances, she said. Many cars already included up to 200 sensors to let the driver know when it needs service so it may be able to aid in human diagnostics as well. Plus, the music drivers listen to can impact blood pressure and other vital signs.

Today’s implantable defibrillators are $20,000 to $30,000 devices that track a lot of information and dump data into a network that only doctors interact with, Saxon said. “That seems like a waste. We can leverage the device to engage patients and help them manage the entirety of their condition.”

In her research, Saxon has found that devices can serve as surrogate health coaches—“a powerful concept that has tested well with patients and families.” Devices can pick up a lot of rich data that can passively disclose information we don’t even know about ourselves. “It’s a discovery process.”

Meanwhile, use of Youtube is very popular as well with 100 hours uploaded every minute. This is another way healthcare can mesh with people’s everyday lives. Short videos can offer healthy recipes. Saxon worked with a food channel to create videos aimed at diabetics. The video got 4,000 hits the first day it was up.

“This can’t all just be for medical purposes,” she said. "It has to be part of everything. All of this is really exploding and getting entrenched in the popular culture.”