Sandor Bekasi is a medical doctor, a health care manager, and an investigator of different mobile and telemedical methods to find optimal solutions for medical ICT, patient engagement, virtual visits and health gamification. As a speaker at the eHealth 360° Summit 2016 (14-16 June, Budapest, Hungary), he will bring his know-how to sessions on Patient-centric approach, and on Successful implementation of eHealth & mHealth solutions. Sandor talked to us about the dissonance between the currently developed eHealth applications and the processes behind traditional medical practice.
Could you introduce the scope of your work and tell us what kind of expertise you will bring to the eHealth 360° Summit?
The main focus of my interests is on primary care: I see a lot of brand new possibilities to achieve better management of chronic patients. In the past years I was working on a Hungarian mobile application framework to integrate PHR and EHR data on the same platform. We had to establish a nationwide system to offer a new kind of insight into lifestyle-related and home-measured parameters for general practitioners. This is an important step towards personalized medicine and I hope that it will multiply the preventive efforts of primary care. As a GP myself, I think new skills are needed to augment the cooperative activity between doctors and clients.
What do you see as the biggest challenge that eHealth is currently facing?
Nowadays a wide range of reliable and cost-effective sensors are available on the healthcare market. I believe the biggest challenge of eHealth will be how to implement these data sources in more traditional forms of medicine. How can we change our protocols to gain the maximum benefit of wearables and remote monitoring? While these devices might improve the user experience and health-consciousness immediately, their effect on patient care remains lagging behind.
Results of a recently published study show that the usage of different digital monitoring methods on their own have no significant clinical or economical benefit on the short-term. We have to do a better job of applying big data to a personal level.
What are your hopes and dreams for the future of eHealth?
With the help of enthusiastic pioneers, we have to keep aiming for the best solutions and show the clear advantages of eHealth both for patients and physicians. While early adopters are extremely important in this process, we must also broaden our horizon and think on a healthcare policy level as well.
I expect a huge boom in the field of telemedicine and remote patient monitoring leading to a much more personalized medicine and self-care era in the near future. I also believe that motivation is an unexploited resource, which needs to be addressed in a tailored manner. Great examples of gamification teach us that motivation has to be a core element of innovation.
Registrations for eHealth 360° Summit 2016 are open! Find out more.
