MIT's New Non-Profit To Gauge Digital Health Products' Value
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced plans to spin the MIT Hacking Medicine Program into a non-profit that will study how well digital health products actually work. The institute will gather together health-care stakeholders to develop methods of determining a digital product’s value.
In recent years, the global wearable technology industry has exploded, and with each passing day there is a new product launch or a new startup looking for investors. According to a report by Transparency Market Research, the market for wearable health technology is expected to reach $5.8 billion by 2018, and some experts claim the figure actually will be much higher.
Items such as wearable biosensors, big-data platforms, telemedicine programs, apps, and fitness devices are growing more complex and versatile every year, and many scientists see this trend as the dawn of a new era in medicine that shifts some control away from the doctor and into the patient’s hands.
“Modern sensors and telecommunications are rebalancing power; in the future, patients could have the information while physicians provide the service,” said Anthony Turner, a professor and research scientist at Linköping University, in a press release.
While no one is denying the revolutionary potential of digital technology, many start-ups are struggling to find ways to prove their worth in a marketplace glutted with new products, all making similar claims.
That’s where MIT steps in. The MIT Hacking Medicine Program started as a way to study how technology and health-care interact. Now, MIT wants to transition the program to a non-profit that will provide unbiased third-party opinions about how a product’s value can be established.
Zen Chu, MIT senior lecturer and faculty director of the Hacking Medicine Program, told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s so much hype now. It’s great, in a way. It’s early stages, and there are so many startup companies. But they’re all having the same trouble. What’s actually working and how do you prove that?”
Chu explained that a variety of options has created increasingly discerning consumers who want to know exactly how well a product works. It’s not just patients, either. Clinicians also must be persuaded to recommend one product over another, and insurance companies need to be convinced of a product’s efficacy before they’ll cover the its cost.
Startups hoping to launch a new product not only have to prove that the device is clinically effective, they also have to demonstrate how it cuts costs for insurance companies and hospitals.
Chu said that MIT’s new institute would host a gathering of different industry experts and health-care stakeholders and record their input. Doctors, device developers, insurance companies, and self-insured employers from every realm of digital health will work together to publish white papers, which Chu said would provide guidelines on how to evaluate a digital product.
According to Chu, the first working groups will convene in early October.