Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. (Watch the full presentation below or at this link, and check out Part 2 and Part 3 of our blog coverage.)
As a board-certified emergency physician, I practiced medicine for many years in several different areas of the United States. Through my clinical experience, I discovered that my passion was actually to focus on systems of care: How do you combine multiple different organizations, resources, and people together to quickly surround a patient and provide care for them?
For the past decade, I've been studying how to leverage mobile technology to be able to bring people together, and how to actually create a shared consciousness around a single patient event.
Digital health is a massive, multi-faceted landscape. The current emphasis on chronic care management, health, and wellness is incredibly important—and as healthcare begins to decentralize, that's where the focus should be. However, my focus is on the acute care space and uniting care teams.
The acute care space usually serves patients that are often undifferentiated and have an unscheduled and unstructured need. When an event happens, how do they enter into the acute care system? How do we get the right patient to the right facility with the right resources at the right time?