The Connected Highway of Healthcare Delivery

[Music] today on vital insights we're also doing a lot of end-to-end virtual care solutions that i think we can talk more about in the future and i i know early sense is one of those but we're also focused on firstnet and our cybersecurity capabilities which has become a huge focus for healthcare in the coming future welcome to an episode of vital insights a podcast series focused on thought leaders and healthcare providers who are working to transform the way we care for patients now and in the future at ces 2022 the digital health conferences are buzzing with new virtual care technology translated through the vantage point of a healthcare industry that has spent almost two years grappling with a global pandemic joining us today to talk about new technology solutions are three guests from the health care vertical at a t joe dragus clara hustad and clint suttie joe and clint welcome back to vital insights and clara thank you for joining us today happy to be here thanks for having us absolutely always enjoy it a quick note for our vitals insights listeners we are recording this episode during the consumer electronics show or ces also known as the largest technology show in the world but due to coveted complications across the board the four of us are tuning in from different remote settings that said none of us has lost the spirit of innovation this week holds as the world looks to las vegas for the latest and greatest in new technology innovation uh so in in some ways i think of this show of ces as being like a fashion show it sets the stage for kind of the wildest explorations into what we might see in technology for the coming year so that said clara i'm going to invite your response here could you tell us what people can expect to see from a t in the year to come well i can definitely say we have a lot of great stuff on the horizon i think the the number one focus we have a lot of number one focuses but one that i'm really happy to talk about is how 5g is really playing a role in healthcare um unfortunately we're not at ces but we had really planned on showcasing a smart camera for inpatient monitoring it would be able to detect fall prevention allow for bed management i know that shorting uh shortages of staff is a big pain point for a lot of providers and just to ensure the workload of the staff is minimized and the efficiency of the hospitals are are maximized so the video solution is connected to a 5g modem it's part of a smart telemonitoring solution we're also doing a lot of end-to-end virtual care solutions that i think we can talk more about in the future and i i know early sense is one of those but um we're also focused on firstnet and our cyber security capabilities which has become a huge focus for health care in the coming future joe and clint is there anything you want to add to that anything we can expect to see from a t i think liza what we'll continue to get really energized about is the ability to enable all these really great innovations like clara mentioned and uh you know what we would have seen at ces and what is on display and showcase digitally are all these really cool innovative ways to monitor and connect with patients virtually and i think you'll see from att that we'll continue to lead in collaborating with these different startups and really really cool companies to enable them to go to market and to connect in secure and really efficient ways and so i'm really excited about seeing where uh this goes and the opportunities that we have to really transform healthcare i love that anything else to add yeah i'll just say that overall if i had to give a trend for 2022 for us it's going to be helping our clients accelerate their digital transformation in healthcare whether it be the scaling of endpoints and that connectivity to securing their scaled infrastructure and everywhere that their data is going to go and live and then helping doctors uh and clinicians really just do their do the valuable part of their work and get rid of the noise and offload as much as that as we can and to do that it's going to require an acceleration of that digital transformation vision within each of our clients and we can help them with that that's fantastic as as i think i've said to each of you in turn there's so much that i want to unpack from each of your answers and and we could i think be on the phone for maybe a couple hours at a time um but i'll but i'll refocus myself and we'll get back to the questions um so one of the primary things that we've all discussed over the past several months together is the way the pandemic has really influenced and sped up various aspects of virtual care growth i'd love to hear each of your perspectives on that and and joe we can start with you yeah liz you can talk to so many people who have never had a virtual interaction with a clinician pre-koved and so many of those individuals have had their first and a lot of times i would say you know it actually worked pretty well in fact i kind of like this better than having to go to the traditional model and check in and wait and and go see my clinician so i think the pandemic for healthcare is going to just completely transform the way clinicians and patients interact and the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible uh and it'll definitely go beyond just virtual visits or what we you know traditionally have called telehealth um so i'm really excited about uh thinking about the possibilities for that interaction virtually um the ability for somebody with a chronic condition to have um nurses and care coordinators watching over them around the clock and then also the ability for uh family to be able to keep tabs on loved ones i think i've shared before you know in my situation that my parents live on the other end of the country and so i'm always excited about thinking about the future of technology and how that's going to enable me to be able to keep tabs on uh my folks as they continue to age in their vitals so i think the pandemic is really going to continue to accelerate the innovation and transformation healthcare and work side to be part of it clara what about you i definitely think that digitization within the hospitals is um it's here to stay and i i unfortunately had to endure a two-hour surgery uh my husband's surgery and the updates i was getting on my phone were pretty amazing i'm not saying i went to the mall but i could have with all of the the updates i was getting i knew exactly where he was in his patient journey and i think that's something that patients and loved ones are going to start expecting in every part of the care continuum from when they enter a hospital all the way until they get home and they need to have that reassurance and be able to control and want to control a lot of the communication and dictate when that communication happens and on the platforms that they would like for it to happen and i think att provides that connectivity all the way through whether it's wi-fi mobility or just direct connectivity within a in a hospital so i i'm excited for all the changes that are happening and i think that something that we wouldn't have experienced previous to to the pandemic which has accelerated that and continues to do so one of the things i really love that you just touched on is is how healthcare providers are having to compete for patients and alongside of that they're trying to understand you know how do we rip a page out of kind of the the retail playbook if you will and look at experiences and how can we improve the experience so i love that you just touched on um your own patient experience and and but but how that's being amplified and what we can expect to see there in the future um clint what about you yeah you know i one of the things i love about the advent of virtual care um is the equitable access potential that it has by you know integrating cellular into things like remote patient monitoring so that they go with um the actual medical devices when they're shipped out to the patient to be monitored at home this typically after they've done some kind of a telehealth visit or maybe gone into a clinic but by cellular by connectivity being integrated into the virtual care platform it means that we don't expect you to already have broadband at your home we don't expect you to be of a socio-economic status to even afford that and there's a billing mechanism to make sure that those things get cared for on the back side operationally and financially but you don't have to worry about that so while clinicians in in hospitals and providers they are competing for those existing patients there's a whole set of population that typically had low access whether it be in rural areas or lower socioeconomic areas uh both rural and urban and to make sure that cellular goes along with your health care means that it becomes frictionless and because of the great bandwidth and performance and coverage of networks like firstnet and at t it means it can also be enriching at the same time so if you don't have to worry about access and it can be effortless and it's enriching i think we'll see a greater adoption rate among some of the most costly multi-comorbidity or chronic population sets that we have really in the world it's not just here in the us so i think cellular is a definitely an equity gap closure i love that and i think the first time that you and i chatted we talked about that and i've gone on just so you know to evangelize that point oh good good so so moving on when we look at kind of the major challenges of the future in remote care scalability is a primary issue and clint you just touched on this a little bit uh do you feel do you really feel that cellular is the answer and if so why and uh clara let's start with you this time so i think the the key factor in this is the ease of mobility and that's i think why it would become the clear winner when somebody has you know remote patient monitoring device and they have to tether it to bluetooth or enable wi-fi on the device a lot of patients don't understand or know how to do that however a lot of people have received a new cell phone over the past couple years and they know how to just turn it on and it just magically works and your sim is updated and you're sending and receiving information and i think that's the beauty of cellular and why it will be the clear winner in terms of connectivity for these types of solutions and the ease of use of it clint what are your thoughts yeah you know along with that i'll just keep going down the stream on it um cellular comes with a lot of integrated security that you typically have to overlay onto wi-fi so is that patient at home what's the security level of their wi-fi network what's the security level of any environment that they go into where they may need to transmit data over that cellular brings sort of that effortless experience of not just connectivity and performance and reliability but also the security aspect that really providers spend a lot of money on trying to secure that multi-use network of wi-fi and now that care will be nomadic to care for those remote patients so that medical devices can flow in and out of that ecosystem security is one of those things that they have to worry less about it's still a priority but when a lot of it comes integrated into the standard of cellular especially 5g it lowers the cost of the connectivity itself because you're not having to add licenses of different types of security products on top of it we can still do that and still do that in those more complex environments for devices but right now it's going to lower the cost overall when you talk about the overly overlapping technologies that have to be added if you're not doing cellular so i think it's overall it's going to end up being a game changer for a lot of the industry as we go forward and joe yeah a lot of the startups that we've worked with uh in the remote patient monitoring space launch their products initially using wi-fi and find that it's not scalable uh for all the reasons mentioned that one of the biggest barriers is access and ease of use and and i'll go back to um you know analogy i use a lot but if you were to send a kit to my mother that required her to get it synced on her wi-fi network and then had to pair all these devices to it she would just keep it in the box and so i it's really important for scalability to have an out-of-the-box easy solution that is already connected to the network um and you know one of the ways that we've been able to differentiate how we offer our capabilities is by offering firstnet which provides even a further set of differentiation that provides even better access even in rural areas and prioritized access so we believe that when you couple those things together it really does help solve some of the challenges associated with lack of access and difficulty that some of these solutions have and that actually perfectly tees up my my next question to you guys which is accessibility and equity in healthcare are two other issues that the pandemic really brought to light how is a t helping the health care system providers patients payers address those well i think first recognizing that virtual care accessibility and value to that care is really linked to the patient's ability to engage in whatever medium of technology that the provider has chosen so it's important for us as technology providers to minimize the effort required to engage with that digital health solution and we have uniquely positioned ourselves with firstnet which is built by att but it is its own individual spectrum i know a lot of our competitors out there say oh we have a fast lane well at 18t we have our own highway so the beauty of that network is that it's the only high-speed broadband communication platform that's built for first responder first responders as well as our public safety community which includes ems doctors nurses and it was designed to support hospitals and emergency care teams we're also looking into utilizing firstnet and have been with remote patient monitoring rural health is a huge part of advancing in that equity and in order to do so we need to have connectivity especially mobile connectivity because it's easier to provide than hardwire services to the middle of nowhere and um you know if you're a provider that has you know a mobile healthcare cart that kind of rolls around or an rv we can enable that with firstnet and and help deploy those solutions and i think that's our role and it's something that's important to each and every one of us as well as our as our company but um it's something we see a huge advantage in and and can play a part i love that that's fantastic uh joe do you want to expand on that yeah we've had a lot of success working with uh tech companies and even providers to come up with cost-effective models in order to get connectivity and devices into the hands of patients that um can't afford or don't have access and so i think one of the roles that we'll continue to play is try to work uh you know within uh boundaries um fortunately reimbursement is uh has improved significantly in this area um and so a lot of times we'll sit down and try to figure out together you know based on reimbursements how can we put together a package with device and connectivity so that way we can kind of take that barrier off the table um so i i think that's going to be a big part of our role and uh we do believe you know firstnet um giving us a much better reach than what we've had traditionally is also going to be part of that answer and clint you want to round out the group sure you know i i'll go uh over to the pharmacist for a second one of the things that got exposed during covid was really when they looked at the data of the clinical trials a a huge population set of underrepresentation occurred in um in in rural the typical areas of rural and lower socioeconomic urban specifically because they could not afford to have that technology sitting there at home to support the wi-fi clinical trial devices or because they could not get to the physical locations in order to do it now that we we actually are putting out a campaign right now with a lot of the pharma clients so we're working with their clinical trial groups to start enabling a lot of those remote patient clinical trial kits to be connected with cellular so that we can get those people's data that population data into those data sets and given that they have a tendency to have a higher propensity to a lot of the new diseases like covid and and some of the other cancers and stuff even the fda is considering that if it is successful to include those groups and we get higher representation that we could lower the overall number within the trial as long as we have better diversity in the population set and they cannot achieve it without a technology like cellular that's integrated and goes along as opposed to assuming that the trial participant has technology waiting to support the trial so we're going to see a lot of benefit in clinical trial data just from cellular access availability and rpm solutions for those that's fantastic well i'm going to i'm going to close us out today with one last question that gives us all a little bit of an accolade so as as you all know we were thrilled to announce this year that our early sons insight plus system won a coveted innovation award this year at ces and that is of course a solution powered by at t iot so do you feel moving into the future that we'll see increasing solutions like this collective one that that we have that we've worked on um and by that i mean the blending of sensing and cellular technology and and uh joe let's start with you absolutely and really exciting announcement i think it just shows uh what's possible when you take really cool innovation like what early sense did and you pair it with connectivity from a t so that you went hand in hand to create a really great solution i think what we'll continue to see liz is yes we'll continue to see more and more innovative devices and ways to get vitals uh from patients what's really cool about this one is it's kind of it's in the background the the patient doesn't have to do anything doesn't have to um set up things doesn't have to put things on her person uh so i think we'll see more and more innovation in that way i think the other thing we'll see is a lot of companies are making really great remote patient monitoring platforms and these software platforms are going to want to integrate with these connected devices to build end-to-end solutions so i think you're going to see partnerships between companies like early sense that make a really great device and with att to help connect that device and then with rpm platforms that want to grab and aggregate the data and provide an n-10 solution so i think there's going to be really great partnerships all in the spirit of transforming healthcare and making it easier for patients and clinicians to stay connected clinton what about you yeah one of the things that we that we definitely have to stand on the gas on are that devices are more and more like early since going to be a continuous monitor of multiple variables that then are correlated to bring about some type of a dashboarding or an intervention suggestion and with all this data going back and forth to the cloud we've already seen the healthcare industry mature enough to have the health fog layer which sits between edge compute and cloud to start looking at how much of that data has to go back and how much can it be reacted to now the fact that the healthcare industry sees value in this continuous multi-variable monitoring like what early senses is putting out there um it really gives an indication to the maturity level of trying to be much more strategic and prepare for the future and i think that what early senses already put out there with the plus platform is it's just really a textbook example of what we're going to see more of in a lot of different areas where we're monitoring at a continuous level in your everyday life as the continuous patient and as that term goes away um your vitals and we act on it uh through ai and then more personable clinician interaction so i just think it bodes well for the maturity level indications of health care as an industry alone and clara the only thing i had to add was i think the beauty of your solution is not just the you know the stages of sleep the sleep scoring the overnight breathing patterns and all of the data that you're collecting but that it's contactless i think when people don't know it's there and it just works and they can take hold of those metrics themselves i think customers are going to start and i'm calling them customers now and not patients but once once they know that they can get this data it's going to be like you know your smart watch or a fitbit you have the data you want to know the data you want to keep track of that data and i think that health is becoming very prevalent in our society today and very at the forefront um and so this these types of solutions especially yours are going to be valuable and those with the best dashboard and the best access to data um are going to be amazing so early sense in 18t just works i couldn't agree more i may be a little bit biased but i couldn't agree and i love that you actually just called them consumers because a patient never wants to be a patient and that's one of the things that we've all talked about many times so um so i love that you just took the leap and called them consumers um so so that that kind of wraps up my questions are there any additional thoughts you guys want to throw out as we're kind of closing out a week of new innovation at ces and i and i can moderate here uh joe would you like to anything you want to add we're excited about the future and uh really excited about how transformation's already taken place um in the hospital in the home and we're grateful to be part of it and thank you liz we really appreciate you uh moderating and bringing us together it's been a lot of fun clara well i just want to say thanks for having me as a podcast newbie this was really fun um but i will say att is is very focused on being the leader in digital healthcare and i think our solutions our network and most importantly our people really are going to make that happen and in the new year and i look forward to seeing how we get that all done and showcasing it probably again on your podcast fabulous i look forward to that and and clint any last thoughts from you hey i i couldn't have said it better i mean you know and to boil it all down att is ready to help you accelerate your digital transformation and improve outcomes and consumers so it's a new day excellent well thank you all so much for joining us once again and i look forward to having you all back again thanks liz thanks liz appreciate it [Music] you

2022-03-26 01:02

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