Thursday, January 29, 2009

Health Record Adoption will be driven by aging

The MobileHealthCrowd blog has an interesting article on the adoption of home-based health sensor technology. The aging population and the desire to live at home will drive a massive adoption of health sensor technology in the next 20 years.

When you think about the implications of this trend it creates fascinating ramifications. These are my thoughts on potential impacts:

  • Continued investment in wireless broadband and Wi-Fi
  • incorporation of monitoring technology in to mobile phones (think about how Apple has built-in the connecting technology for the Nike sensor in to their latest iPod)
  • Adoption of dual-homed routers for the home to provide fail-over circuits. This could include automatic fail-over to wireless broadband services
  • Rising adoption of Personal Health Records

It is the last potential development that is really interesting. As we age and want to stay in our homes and independent we will need to collect and share monitoring information from a myriad of devices. Where will this information be stored? The logical place is our Personal Health Record. When you recognize this it becomes likely that the senior segment of the population will be the big adopters of the Electronic Personal Health Records. Adoption will occur because their lives and their independence may depend upon it.

Unlike most Internet technology adoption we have seen to date which has come from the more youthful segments of the population - in health terms - the Young Invincible crowd. Personal Health Record adoption could come from our Seniors first.

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