Possible Challenges facing Smart City Healthcare System

A lot of cities and societies worldwide are at the forefront of developing smart cities controlled by sensors, transmitters and intelligent data analyses to enhance quality of living, economic opportunity and security for communities and regions.

A smart city is a society in terms of healthcare “where the residents can engage with smart services that are specifically designed to improve their health,” said Chris Gibbons, MD, MPH, chief executive officer of Greystone Group.

Somehow, the world is gradually adopting this kind of connected ecosystem by using smart home products, such as connected thermostats, fitness trackers, and personal as acknowledged by Jennifer Kent, senior director at Parks Associates.

According to her, “Consumers aren’t all that familiar with the terms that we use, like smart cities, smart communities, and what they necessarily mean from a big-picture perspective. That’s really industry terminology,” she said. “What they are interested in and aware of are applications that affect them, or that they have interacted with in their daily lives. Much of what’s going on in smart cities is still sort of at the infrastructure level, trial level, so consumers haven’t really seen a lot of it. But healthcare, actually, is one of the places that consumers are starting to interact with [the Internet of things] … especially coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Kent pointe that, consumers expect providers and government payers to be reimbursed or charged for coverage making the model to be little tougher on the health care side. This creates divide in the competition between those people that can afford these smart devices for their own management and empowerment and those that have them to gotten for them for something specific like tracking diabetes, monitoring them after discharge from a hospital.

Data privacy and security, said Skip Newberry, president and CEO of the Technology Association of Oregon, are also a big problem in consumer accepting this new trend of technology in health. This was illustrated in smart home project conducted in his state by Oregon Health and Science University’s ORCATECH.

Kent said her group sees common issues among consumers and that users want more than anything to know precisely how their information is used. This will help those concerned on how their information is collected, used and shared. To ensure that, Rhee, Kent and Newberry will be discussing these topics and other issues with respect to data-connected communities during an Accelerate Health digital session titled “Smart Cities, Healthier Communities.” at 2:05 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, September 29, 2020.