Dr John Rumsfeld: We're Just at the Beginning of the Digital Health Transformation

Digital health, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and precision medicine are the areas where there is the most excitement in innovations for cardiovascular care, said John Rumsfeld, MD, PhD, chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What evolving technologies in cardiology are you expecting to see make big improvements in care?

When we think about innovations coming to cardiovascular care, and specifically transformation of care delivery, I think the areas where there is the most excitement is in digital health, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and precision health or precision medicine. Now, those cross over with each other, but when I talk about those I’m really talking about things like mobile health, wearable sensors, and then using new data sources, which may include genomics, but also other data sources, like social network data, to have a better sense of predicting risk and then combining those digital health tools with the analytics to have more precise care for patients to keep patients healthier, with a focus on health rather than disease, and a focus on care outside the hospital. All of that is a little bit general, but what I think is, is that we are just at the beginning of the digital health transformation.

Healthcare started off in kind of tough way because the first digital healthcare transformation was the electronic health record, which for many clinicians and others has been a frustrating experience and has not been adopted as a new medical device might be for a procedure. Well, they were not really designed to be good in terms of digital transformation. They don’t make things easier or more efficient except from a billing code standpoint, for the most part. They will evolve, but what we really hope will evolve is how we are going to integrate new digital health tools, wearable sensors, and so forth, into our care. It’s still unclear how that’s going to happen because right now there’s a lot of consumer products and there are some products being sold at the health system level. But, what hasn’t happened enough yet is the design and development of digital health tools, specifically to help the interface between patients and their families, and clinicians.