Joe Kvedar, VP of Connected Health, Partners HealthCare, Chapter 2

It started 20 years ago with a vision to leverage technology to improve access to care and efficiency. But instead of the iPhones and FitBits that are driving care today, it was a camera the size of a shoebox that offered game-changing potential. Today, Partners HealthCare Connected Health continues to push the envelope by transforming healthcare through tools like remote monitoring and virtual care. In this interview, Joe Kvedar, MD, talks about how the organization has evolved to meet the changing needs of patients and providers, why telemedicine is finally rising to the top, and the problem with statistics around patient engagement. He also discusses what encourages him most as a physician, and how CIOs can navigate this brave new world.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2



* The term “Connected Health”

* Telehealth’s struggles, then surge

* “Facetime and Skype changed the way we think about video.”

* Understanding doctors — “We are very methodical creatures.”

* Payers & retail as drivers of mobile health

* Remote monitoring on the rise

* Mobile tools for patient engagement — “It’s a journey.”



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Bold Statements

Most of the time we’re talking about the same thing, and most of the time our choice of words has to do with our viewpoint. For us, we thought connectivity was a big part of what made this special. The initial vision was time and place independent, and you had to have connectivity for that.

We do things very methodically. If we translate that into the world of moving from face to face to digital, video seems like a comfortable environment, because even though you’re not in my office, I can see you, I can talk to you, and I can take a history.

Reimbursement is happening. People used to feel like they had to wait for that to be all nailed down, and now all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘We know it’s going to happen so we better get going, and we’ll figure that out as we go along.’

Other industries have done this already for years. You check yourself in at the airport. You pump your own gas. You buy things online. You do your travel planning over a website. But in healthcare, we still think the only way we can add value is for you to come visit us in an office. We have to make that leap, and it gets into the idea of using mobile engagement tools, and eventually, artificial intelligence.

Gamble:  When you talk about Connected Health, what came to mind for me was mobile health, but that’s just one aspect of it.

Kvedar:  The naming thing has always been a problem in this space, and I contributed to it — not with malice. I mentioned earlier we called ourselves telemedicine in the beginning. Some people in the mid-90s came in and said, ‘We ought to call it telehealth because if we call it telehealth, we can talk about educational activities and other things and broaden the scope.’ And so we had this debate. Parenthetically, I was president of American Telemedicine Association about 10 years ago, and we spent a whole board meeting debating whether we should change our name to telehealth or stay at telemedicine.

So it was a big deal. It’s hard to believe this because it’s so hot right now, but 10 to 12 years ago, telemedicine was a bit like a millstone around your neck. We were doing all these other things with what we now call wearables — we didn’t have that term then — home monitoring and sensors, stuff like that. We coined the term ‘connected health’ in 2006 because we needed a new way of talking about what we were doing, and so that became another term that’s now well adopted in the industry.