About the Expert:
David Harlow JD MPH, Healthcare Compliance Counsel at Insulet Corporation
David Harlow is a seasoned health care attorney and consultant recognized as an accomplished, innovative, and resourceful thought leader in health care law, strategy, and policy. His experience in both the public and private sectors over the past thirty years affords him a unique perspective on legal, policy, and business issues facing the health care community. David has a passion for innovation, a preference for simplicity where feasible, and a practical approach to crafting actionable solutions.
Digital Health Tools and Patient Experience
Today I’m involved in conversations with healthcare providers with healthcare technology organizations, and also importantly, with patients who need a voice in the development of these tools since the patients are users of these tools that are being used to help patients. Ultimately, I think it is important for the technology vendors, the builders, the toolmakers to understand the patient perspective, not only in what is a patient-facing interface, but in terms of what is ultimately important to the patient. If that perspective can be baked into products and services that are facing the provider and payer. We can get better.
Patient Participation
Compliance or adherence from patients is understanding what the patients are interested in. I don’t want a doctor to frown at me and tell me I need to lose 20 pounds. I would like to come up with that idea myself, and maybe not say 20 pounds. But maybe when we work on a plan together, I want to be able to dance at my daughter’s wedding, let’s say, and let’s focus on that as a goal rather than an arbitrary number, i.e. you need to lose 20 pounds. Questioning what are the things that we need to do to reach patients to motivate patients to adopt healthy behaviors for themselves and to be engaged in health care not only within the healthcare delivery system but throughout our lives because health does not stop at the doctor’s office door. It’s something that we live with day today.
David Harlow on Digitizing Health Care
The wave of future data and digitization informs so much of our society today and so much of our endeavors. It’s important to see that advances happen in the realm of care as well. It’s been slow to happen. The government, of course, has had a hand and having the industry take a great leap forward, so to speak. But we still haven’t realized the benefits of that digitization of that great leap forward. Healthcare providers are now largely digitized. The question is, what do we do with all that data? There’s a great opportunity for population health improvements for personalized medicine for other things that are not quite there yet. The future is always right around the corner, but we’re getting close.
This interview was recorded at Expo.Health