AirStrip president on fixing MU, solving interoperability

More and more futuristic body sensors are coming to market but Matt Patterson, MD, president of AirStrip, isn’t impressed. “Right now, physicians don’t care about sensor data, especially consumer data.”

That type of data will become incredibly important in healthcare, he said, but not until developers come to terms with two things Patterson says have a big impact on their future success: 1. More data is not necessarily better data. Information “has to be wrapped with a certain amount of broader context for that data point to be meaningful.” 2. Data needs to be made actionable through intelligence.

As AirStrip considers mergers and acquisitions of sensor vendors, Patterson said, “I am most preferential to those addressing those two things.”

AirStrip acquired Sense4Baby a year ago which was its first foray into the hardware and sensor market. Prior to that, the company was almost exclusively a software company making mobile apps that displayed sensor data. They expanded from the obstetrics, cardiac and critical care monitoring business to accepting real-time data from any body sensor inside or outside of the hospital setting. They went for Sense4 Baby, which recently earned FDA approval, because of their past experience with obstetrics.

Because AirStrip brings multiple workflows together into one, “be definition we play a huge role in providing context,” said Patterson. “We are increasingly now partnering with others in the analytics space to stream data received into interpretive algorithms and conditioning data to make them actionable and meaningful.”

With the focus on interoperability, Patterson said the problem originates with the HITECH Act because there weren’t enough incentives in place for Meaningful Use to really have benefits beyond the first stage. “I applaud the government’s efforts to get involved but I’m very, very disappointed with the first volley. Any time you put out a list of discrete variables and say this is going to be the standard for interoperability, vendors will look to that not as the bare minimum but as the maximum they have to do. They will quickly try to accommodate those variables in a manner that does not disrupt their way of doing business and protects their underlying business models.”

Further progress needs to come from health systems, consumers, employers and payers who are fed up with not having true, meaningful interoperability, he added. “Vendors cannot be trusted to come up with their own modalities of interoperability and standards. We’ve seen it fail over and over. We need a coalition of the willing among health systems and those footing the bill.”

Focusing on variables, Patterson said, does nothing to solve the real intricacies of interoperability.  What’s needed is focus on how systems should talk to each other, vocabularies and data standards. Focusing on specific data elements is “an impossible venture because we can never predict the amount of data that’s going to be available. Body sensors are going to detect things we’ve never even heard of before. There’s no way you can keep a standard based on a variable ahead of the curve.” Stakeholders should instead decide how data should be structured and transferred, he said. Then, buyers should not sign contracts unless vendors can demonstrate that their data can be made available to others. “That’s really what’s missing but I see the seeds of that slowly growing. One of our main priorities is to foster that. We want to be part of that.”

Patterson said buyers should ask vendors if they have a database that is interoperable. “Be very aware of an entity saying they want to be transparent because it threatens their business model. Vendors are going to have to change their business models around interoperability. It will be interesting to see how they will protect their secrets.”

Meanwhile, he is excited that Airstrip has “gone from a company producing very discrete applications to a comprehensive interoperability platform that enables care collaboration and innovation in a variety of different settings. We’re excited to share about what we’ve been doing.”