All I Want For Christmas (in Healthcare Technology)

As I think about our healthcare system, there are lots of things I’d like that would be useful in improving patient outcomes.  So, beyond the obvious things that we’d all like such as:

• Elimination of waste
• A true healthcare not sick care system
• Aligned incentives
• Alignment of outcomes and quality with cost

Here’s what’s at the top of my list from a technology perspective.

1. Food App.  I’d like a food app that did the following:
   • Allowed me to scan in food that I buy and eat
   • Allowed me to take a picture of my food and estimate the calorie count
   • Allow me to enter a restaurant and use geo-tagging to push to me the best things to eat on the menu
   • Allow me to dynamically manage my food choices based on my diagnoses
   • Push coupons to me at the store based on what I eat and what I might
2. Open Enrollment Tool.  I’d like a tool that helped me optimize which benefit to enroll in based on:
   • Historical utilization patterns of Rx and medical and projected spend based on tools like the Johns Hopkins ACG model
   • A configuration engine to help me optimize on key factors that matter to me (out-of-pocket versus convenience…for example)
3. Engagement Scoring.  I’d like a way to understand the likelihood of an individual member to engage based on each of the following:
   • Demographics – age, gender, location
   • Disease
   • Channel – e-mail, call, print, SMS, IVR
   • Patient Activation Measure (PAM)
4. Communications Tailoring Learning Algorithm.  I’d like a learning system that continuously updated the engagement score based on Internet usage along with consumer feedback and smart phone data.
5. Physician Integration.  I’d like to see consumer data and claims data integrated with physician data into one shared system that the physician, the member, and the broader care team could all share and access.  I’d also like that data to include both structured and unstructured (i.e., notes) data that fed an overall patient care algorithm to identify gaps-in-care and predict intervention points for improving outcomes.
6. Smart Phone Data Integration.  I continue to believe that the smart phone data is a huge set of information that could be used to tell me things like:
   • Activity
   • Sleeping patterns
   • Social behavior
   • Preferred channel
   • Personal goals
   • Stress
7. Google Glasses For Healthcare.  I continue to believe that the virtual world and the physical world will become more ubiquitous.  Google Glasses have an opportunity to accelerate that.  I’d love to see how to leverage these in unique ways to improve the patient and physician communication chasm.

On a related note, I’d love to find a technology that allowed me to take all my blog posts and tweets and configure them by topic into an e-book.  That seems like something logical.