Where Digital Health Care Is Going, by Penny Moore

Partner, Commonwealth Health Advisors, Digital Health Enthusiast

Penny Moore

Stop for a moment and think about the mobile apps you access on your smartphone more than five times a day.

• Text messaging. Email. LinkedIn. Facebook. CNN Newsfeed. Would you say these mobile apps are embedded into your daily routine? Would you say they have impacted your approach to life? No doubt, they have.

Now imagine a program designed to help individuals with chronic conditions change their lifestyle habits and get healthier by sustaining an average of 5.2 daily interactions with its participants over 16 weeks.

Impossible, you say? It is happening! I have seen it.

The Digital Health Revolution explores how progressive technology advancements are democratizing health care for the consumer. New digital technologies, big data analytics, and sophisticated AI are now innovating health care delivery with powerful digital apps. It is the contemporary creative digital design that draws an individual in to easily consume clinical evidence-based medicine in actionable methods that naturally become part of daily living.

I am a seasoned health behavioral change skeptic! The hardest thing to do is to get people with chronic conditions from lifestyle etiologies to change their behavior. Even people with the best of intentions fail at sustaining healthy behaviors.

For more than twenty years, I have dedicated my professional life to the evolution of population health and disease management. My passion has been driven by the sobering realization that during the last century we were dying from diseases and viruses we caught when we left our homes. Now, it is from things we do to ourselves. Our daily lifestyle choices matter, and they all add up over time.

Since 2011, I have immersed my focus on the advancement of behavioral change programs by the digital revolution. I am awestruck by the exponential improvement that consumer-centric digital design, machine learning, and conversational bots can have on achieving what clinicians, behavioral scientists, and others have only imagined for over twenty years.

For over three decades, physicians have been taught that the first line of therapy for type 2 diabetes and early stage cardiovascular disease is diet and exercise. It seems physicians have given up on people changing their lifestyle contributors to disease. Many societal and health care trends have played into that. It is much easier for physician and patient to utilize drugs to manage these chronic conditions and slow their progression.

Current digital and technological advances are making it possible for lifestyle behavioral change to not be dependent solely on individual willpower. Today’s digital tools, leveraging modern data application, are empowering consumers to put skillpower to work changing their lives. To sustain behavioral change, people need consistent input. They need the right information, timed to a meaningful, teachable moment, suggesting actions based on their own data to build skills and routines that shift their daily approach to living. Consumers are quickly catching on that these digital tools are creating sustained changes in their lives that are relieving them from the burden of a life sentence of taking drugs to stay healthy.

So, plug in – get connected to Digital Health Revolution and benefit from the insights of how health care is now transforming from physician-driven care to empowered patient-physician partnerships.

About Penny Moore

Penny Moore is a partner with Commonwealth Health Advisors. She has devoted her career to providing leadership to growth-oriented companies that are transforming population health through innovation with digital technology.  Most recently, Penny has led the commercialization for early stage digital health start-ups Kurbo Health and Better Therapeutics.   As the Chief Revenue Officer for ShapeUp, a venture-backed company that pioneered social wellness, Penny’s leadership created a high-quality book of global business opportunities that paved the path to a successful exit.  She has held executive leadership roles with large health plans such as Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare and Aetna. You can follow Penny on Twitter.