Episode Details - Advancing Digital Health
What you’ll get from this episode:
- Venturing into Health Technology: Meg Barron shares her extensive experience in healthcare, focusing on health technology, from working in marketing and business development roles to engaging with accelerators and incubators.
- Driven by Personal Healthcare Stories: Her personal story, involving her family’s health struggles, fuels her passion for improving healthcare through technology, highlighting the need for accessibility and equity in healthcare.
- Centering Physicians and Patients in Tech Development: Barron emphasizes the importance of involving physicians and patients in the development and evaluation of digital health technologies, ensuring their needs and experiences are central.
- Addressing Digital Health Challenges: She discusses the challenges in digital health, such as solution fatigue, and the need for holistic solutions that address multiple problems efficiently and effectively.
- Evaluating Digital Health at Peterson Institute: Barron’s current work at the Peterson Health Technology Institute focuses on independent evaluations of digital health technologies, aiming to identify what works and is worth scaling up.
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Background and Career Journey
Meg Barron, with over 20 years in healthcare technology, began her career in corporation marketing and transitioned to roles in segmentation marketing at the American Medical Association (AMA). Her involvement with healthcare accelerators and her entrepreneurial ventures provided her with a comprehensive understanding of healthcare innovation.
Personal Motivation in Healthcare
Barron’s personal connection to healthcare, witnessing her parents navigate health challenges and her mother’s battle with cancer, has deeply influenced her passion for making healthcare more accessible and equitable. She advocates for the integration of health technology as a means to address these critical issues.
Involvement with Digital Health
During her time at the AMA, Barron explored the integration of digital health technologies, focusing on areas like virtual care, clinical decision support tools, and remote patient monitoring. She emphasizes the importance of innovation in healthcare and its role in addressing system inefficiencies and improving patient outcomes.
The Role of Patients and Providers in Innovation
Barron stresses the significance of incorporating feedback from both healthcare providers and patients in the development of digital health solutions. This approach ensures that the innovations are not only technically sound but also practically useful and user-friendly.
Challenges in Digital Health and Overcoming Them
She notes that while digital health has seen enthusiasm from physicians, challenges like point solution fatigue and integration into existing workflows remain significant barriers. Barron underscores the necessity for digital health solutions to demonstrate clinical efficacy, address practical concerns of integration, and ensure they meet the needs of end-users efficiently.
Future Directions and Collaborative Efforts
Barron’s current work at the Peterson Health Technology Institute involves collaborating with healthcare organizations and conducting independent evaluations of digital health technologies. This collaborative approach aims to align efforts in the digital health space, promote evidence-based solutions, and improve the scalability of effective technologies.
This episode is presented by AmplifyMD.
“AmplifyMD immediately connects medical facilities to a large network of
physicians in all of the most essential specialties, including Neurology, Cardiology,
Infectious Disease, Pulmonology and Heme/Onc.” Their mission is access, by becoming
the definitive specialty care platform that connects every medical facility to the specialty
care they need to improve patient outcomes. – https://amplifymd.com/
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