Dr Lonny Reisman Outlines the Benefits of Health IT for Patients With Chronic Conditions

Improved health technologies will help physicians better monitor patients with chronic conditions so that those patients can receive more effective care and will help build a bridge between what has been reported as effective in literature and applying it to the patient, explained Lonny Reisman, MD, founder and CEO of HealthReveal.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How do patients with chronic conditions, like diabetes, benefit from improved health technologies?

I think there are a couple of things that allow patients to really benefit from health technology and health information technology. The first is on the analytics side. So to the extent that there’s so much being learned and appreciated regarding say, the pathophysiology of diseases like diabetes and the effectiveness of interventions, the ability to create a bridge, technologically, between what we’ve seen in the literature as being effective and getting that literature applied to the patient in a broader population, represents a tremendous opportunity.

The other issue, with regards to technology, relates to the visibility of the practitioner in understanding what’s happening with a particular patient. If you consider our traditional methods for tracking patients—somewhat arbitrarily scheduled office visits, emergency room visits, those sorts of things—and then to have visibility into a patient’s activities, glucose levels, blood pressure, adherence, represents an ability for the physician or the care team to continuously monitor that patient; and gives all of us the opportunity to intervene when there’s an aberration from an optimal clinical path.