S3: #029: Dr. Michelle Longmire on Removing Barriers to Innovation in Healthcare
There are about 300,000 mobile health apps on the market, about double what there was a few years ago. With these apps being downloaded more than 3 billion times per year, one would hope that there would be a corresponding trend in continued and sustained use; that at the very least the data would be used to provide better insights into research and clinical encounters. Unfortunately, that isn’t often the case, and most of the apps (even the ones that are compliant and interoperable) they often aren’t integrated with any sort of analytics platform. So, the data that they produce exist in a vacuum. en years after the launch of the iPhone, mobile health apps really aren’t fulfilling their potential.
There needs to be an ecosystem that allows rapid development of compliant and interoperable apps, and that includes better, and easier to use analytics. Over the past few years we’ve seen innovations like Apple’s Care Kit and Research Kit, and Research Stack for Android, but even with these tools there are still hundreds of decisions that developers need to make in order to create effective and compliant apps.
Here to give some context and understanding is Dr. Michelle Longmire. Dr. Longmire studied medicine at the University of New Mexico before completing her training in dermatology at Stanford University. Dr. Longmire is a part of a growing group of physician entrepreneurs, and she is driven by her desire to improve human health through advances in technology.
She is the CEO and co-founder of Medable Inc, a Palo Alto based application and analytics platform focused on healthcare. She’s going to tell us how she made the move from physician-researcher to physician-entrepreneur, how her entrepreneurial journey has evolved over the past few years, and what is being done to integrate mobile application data from the home, to research to the clinic. She knows what she’s talking about because Medable is already being used by leading pharma, med device and implantable companies – and even beyond that, their platform is being used by providers themselves to develop solutions that engage their patients in clinical practice. Medable is also a part of the USC Virtual Clinic we spoke about back on Episode 9 with Dr. Leslie Saxon – You can go back and listen to that episode to get some more insights.
Today’s Topics:
- The euphoria of discovery and innovation from a researcher’s perspective, and comparison to the entrepreneur’s experience of commercialization
- Lessons learned in developing a HIPAA compliant dermatology app
- The challenges facing developers, researchers and clinicians in creating and deploying mobile apps
- The importance of goals, mission and vision in overcoming obstacles to innovation
- The challenge, power and opportunity to integrate lifestyle data into clinical and research environments
Links and Resources Mentioned:
- Medable
- Michelle on LinkedIn
- Michelle on Twitter
- Digital Health Events
- Join Digital Health Today
