[Image: Prof. Paul Lillrank addresses workshop]CyLab MRC Mobile Health Workshop: Helsinki University of Technology on the Known Unknowns
Paul Lillrank, Professor of Quality and Service Management and Karita Illoven, Director of Research, Helsinki University of Technology, spoke on "The Known Unknowns of Mobile Health."
To view their presentation, click here.
Q&A on Mobile Health Workshop Themes
What is your vision of how mobile health will improve outcomes, reduce costs and/or improve patient (and provider) experiences?
Paul Lillrank and Karita Illoven, Helsinki University of Technology: Mobile solutions break constraints, such as time (asynchronous communication modes), location (no wires), data quality (sensor systems) etc. This provides new degrees of freedom to design service production systems.
By breaking constraints, mobile solutions can be expected to have impacts on output efficiency (technical, economic, and allocative), and outcome effectiveness (coproduction of health outcomes. The effects can be expected to be different depending on the various operating modes, such as visits, cure, care, elective, emergency, preventive, and projects. Patient centricity requires not only process work-flow modeling, but ways to describe and analyze patient health behavior: health events and how they combine into episodes; and interactions that take place in service events.
What are the most pressing business, process, organization, cultural and technical issues in mobile health?
Lillrank and Illoven: Business -- To develop appropriate performance metrics to enable revenue models and cost-benefit analysis
Process -- Understanding and analyzing the various types of healthcare value chains, producer processes, patient episodes, and the service events where these intersect; and the points where mobile solutions may have an impact.
Organization -- The supra-process (process governance) level, i.e. the power, responsibility, monitoring, and incentive systems required for successful implementation.
Cultural -- Professional corporate cultures suitable to manage exceptions, non-routines, etc. white spaces between / beyond defined processes and protocols.
Technical -- Inter-operability, data compatibility, appropriate technology, easy user interfaces
What are the best opportunities for collaborative university research?
Lillrank and Illoven: Theory-oriented researchers need access to real-world problems and issues; platforms to test various solutions; and ongoing discussion / brainstorming with practitioners. Problem centric research needs to draw on various disciplines (e.g. outcome –based revenue model development would need inputs from business economics, clinical and behavioral medicine, device technology, software development, etc.) and observe implementation.