Updated June 08, 2015.

I spoke with the founder and director of Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health, Dr. Joseph C. Kvedar. We discussed how connected health is being used in acute care and long-term care, and how connected health is finding its place within the insurance industry and Accountable Care Organizations.

Read Part 1 of the interview.

3. In which scenario has mHealth been off to a faster growth start, long-term care and assisted living, or regular health plans for insuring the working population?

Why?

Dr. Kvedar:
The non-acute sector (long-term care, assisted living, skilled nursing facility) has been cash-poor for years. You don't tend to find a lot of people making bold investments (due to the psychology of being cash-poor for so long) just yet. There are exceptions, but small pockets.

4. Mobile Health Technology seems to be focusing on biometrics for some of the most common, and costly chronic conditions, such as diabetes, COPD, heart disease. That makes sense because if the promise of connected health is realized, millions of lives, and millions of dollars, could be saved. But what is the next phase of focus? What is Partners Connected Health hoping to tackle 5 to 10 years from now?

Dr. Kvedar:

• Automating care: Healthcare is human resource inefficient. 60% of healthcare costs is labor. Healthcare delivery is .8% less efficient in labor, while the rest of the country's labor has become 1.8% MORE efficient. We need to move healthcare in that direction.
• As an example, we want to make patients more empowered to affect their own health. We've launched a blood pressure cuff at-home pilot program. We gave patients an algorithm to change their blood pressure medication dosages themselves based on very specific criteria from their doctor. This kind of patient empowerment is an area we'd like to explore for growth.

• As genetics and analytics and Big Data hit healthcare, connected health offers the phenotypic side of the equation. How these two intersect will be interesting. For example, genetic fingerprints at birth may indicate that the newborn will be prone to obesity later in life. So we could encourage that person at an early age, even at the crawling and learning-to-walk stage, to stay active and make it a habit, with the intent of avoiding obesity before it becomes a problem.
• We're also anticipating technological, and even psychological, advances in consumer connected health: devices, apps, mobile phones, cloud storage. How we motivate people to become more involved and take an ownership in their health care. Choosing the right motivational psychology will be an interest so that we can improve patient compliance to therapy.

5. Has the mHealth industry connected with an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) yet to help them meet their quality benchmarks and financial targets?

Dr. Kvedar:

• It's early. The ACO model is very disruptive to larger institutions because hospitals don't have a history in population health management.
• The accountable care scenario is asking everyone to work as a large organization and thus to be paid differently. We don't have good systems for identifying populations of patients and segmenting them the way, say, Blue Cross Blue Shield or Aetna might. Connected Health is on people's minds and being used. But when you turn the reimbursement model upside down, there is a step where organizations have to react to that. And of course the bigger they are, the harder it is to turn the ship 90-degrees. As they react, the first thing they are forced to do is grapple with what it means to manage a population.
• We have to create systems that can predict which patients will be at risk for expensive care. Once that infrastructure goes in, the next phase will be, how we use connected health as a tool set to extend our providers across larger populations of patients. We'll be paying attention to how connected health will enable us to use the brick and mortar buildings more strategically to care for large populations with better use of human resources. And of course, we want connected health programs to help us care for patients in a high quality way. We also hope patients will have a great affinity for the organization because they feel so connected.

Read more about Connected Health Solutions for Accountable Care Organizations.

Read more about Improving Healthcare Quality with the Accountable Care Organization Model.