Expanding Wireless Health Summit Looks to Inform and Change Patient Behavior

After years of carefully shepherding San Diego’s emerging mobile health industry, Rob McCray says the sixth annual wireless health convergence summit that begins tomorrow in downtown San Diego isn’t just about “convergence” any more.

McCray, who is CEO of the nonprofit Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA), instead sounded a theme that seems to resonate in these uncertain economic times.

“The problems of healthcare have gotten worse,” McCray told me recently. “The United States and the world in general have started to wake up to the fact that access to healthcare is declining and costs are increasing. Just over the last 12 months, there’s been a marked increase in the intensity of concern—and in this convergence of technology and healthcare where we operate, we have this opportunity to increase access and reduce costs.”

So it’s not just about developing wireless innovations for use in healthcare, McCray said. As an example, he said Procter & Gamble has joined the WLSA as a global partner, and the Cincinnati, OH-based provider of Tide detergent, Duracell batteries, Pantene shampoo, and Pringles potato chips is neither a wireless nor a healthcare company. Yet P&G recognizes healthcare as a global market, with new opportunities emerging that could become important to the diverse consumer products company.

Rob McCray

For companies already focused on wireless health, McCray says the biggest challenge is to develop products and services “that actually bend the curve of healthcare costs.” Increasingly, the industry views changing patient behavior as the critical component to addressing the worldwide obesity epidemic and other long-term health concerns.

Changing behavior—consumer behavior—actually plays to the strengths of a company like Procter & Gamble, McCray said. Many of the services and mobile apps that are being developed as “wireless health” technologies are being designed to help consumers change their behavior, for example, by helping them to stop smoking or count their calories at each meal. And many of these offerings, especially those intended for use outside a clinic or hospital, “are only going to be effective if they can change behavior—change health care—for a long period of time,” McCray said.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.