Not that long ago it might have seemed strange to see company names like IBM (Armonk, New York), Intel (Santa Clara, California), Motorola (Schaumburg, Illinois), and Microsoft (Redmond, Washington) making headlines in Medical Device Daily. After all – these companies might be giants in their own industry, but what do they have to do with healthcare?

But in recent years these and other IT companies have become regulars on the pages of MDD.

The recent market review on the remote health monitoring (RHM) segment from Scientia Advisors (Cambridge, Massachusetts) highlights the healthcare opportunity these technology companies are trying to seize. According to Scientia, RHM is the fastest growing segment of the home health management market, and is projected to double from $1.8 billion in 2007 to $3.6 billion in 2012 – representing a compound annual growth rate of 15%.

So it is no wonder that companies like IBM, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft, and others, are “waking up and saying, 'hold on, we know electronics . . . sensors, we know that too. This is our right to play,“ Harry Glorikian, a managing partner at Scientia, told MDD.

And the expertise from these IT companies certainly seem to play a valuable role in transforming healthcare delivery.

In the Cleveland Clinic-Microsoft pilot project, which was reported on earlier this month (MDD, March 9, 2010), participants used at-home heart rate monitors, glucometers, scales, pedometers or blood pressure monitors, depending on their disease. These devices uploaded the patient's data to Microsoft's HealthVault – a security-enhanced, Web-based data storage platform for patients – which then connected to the patient's personal health record at the Cleveland Clinic, MyChart, by Epic Systems (Verona, Wisconsin) and the EMR system used by the patient's healthcare providers at the hospital, MyPractice, also by Epic.

In October, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano wowed attendees at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit when he told them why the U.S. healthcare system isn't a “system“ at all and explained why the time has come for a smarter healthcare system (MDD, Oct. 7, 2009).

“At IBM this is something we know quite a bit about; we know about systems,“ Palmisano said. He outlined four essential qualities any system must have to be well-functioning: first, there must be clarity on the system's purpose or goal; second, its elements must be connected – interfaces matter; third, we must be able to know, continually and with confidence, the status of the system and its critical components; and last, the system must be able to adapt as conditions change.

According to Palmisano, the world is becoming smarter, more instrumented, and more interconnected. He pointed out that the UPC was originally developed to help supermarkets improve checkout speed. We now know, he said, that the invention of the UPC “did much more than improve checkout speed.“ He said it also “streamlined global supply chains.“ Many of the Cleveland Clinic attendees who listened to Palmisano's speech walked away asking themselves if the electronic medical record could be for the healthcare industry what barcodes were for the retail industry.

— Amanda Pedersen