Consumer Digital Health and Hospitals

This week I’m attending the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I’ve been attending the conference for about 8 years and so it’s been really interesting for me to see the evolution of the event. For those not familiar with it, it’s a massive event with well over 150,000 attendees across a wide array of consumer electronics.

I’ll admit that when I first attended the event, it was more about seeing the circus and enjoying the various consumer electronics as a consumer. Basically, there wasn’t very much digital health at CES 8 years ago. The same can’t be said today. There’s a whole Digital Health section including the conference within a conference Digital Health Summit. Each year the digital health portion of CES has gotten bigger and bigger and I expect it to be massive this week.

I already saw a sneak peak of a variety of health devices at the CES unveiled event. There are some really interesting things happening. A lot of the devices focus on health and fitness, but I’ll be interested to see how they bridge the divide to hospitals and doctors. Plus, I saw this really interesting hand held keyboard which could be really useful in healthcare. I’m sure to write more about it in the future.

While the technology at an event like CES is really cool and interesting, I wonder if any hospitals really take note of what’s happening. Does all this Digital Health that’s happening in the consumer space ever make it to the hospital environment? Ok, maybe the word “ever” is wrong. Of course any innovation will make it their eventually, but it doesn’t seem there’s a natural way for hospitals to learn and discover what’s happening in this space and how they can apply it to the hospital environment.

Am I correct on this or do you see something different? Hopefully I can do a little bit to help those in hospitals learn about what’s happening with Digital Health at an event like CES. So, watch for most CES related posts over the next week.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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