“Smart Services” Service Lunch : Innovating Healthcare through Mobile Data and Predictive Analytics

Last week’s Brown Bag Lunch was dedicated to databased services in healthcare. Two industry experts from medical technology and health IT presented innovative applications for databased services.

In front of some 30 guests, Matthias Mohler, Head of Analytics Consulting of Swisscom, presented Swisscom’s data-analytics approach. The case of an anonymized psychiatric clinic showed that one of the key hurdles of data-analysis remains the quality and standardization of data. A first step to any data-analysis project is thus to identify the most critical variables and define standard coding.

Our second speaker was Alex Geiger, Senior Specialist for Connected Health at Zimmer, the global market leader in hip and knee replacement. Mr. Geiger illustrated a very different ‘smart-service’ application: Using Apple Watches as a communication and motivation tool for patients undergoing hip or knee replacement surgery. The focus of this large-scale clinical study is to improve the patient – physician communication during the entire therapy process from a couple of weeks prior to the surgery to post-surgical rehabilitation.

A stimulating discussion after the presentations highlighted well that despite technical and data quality aspects, data protection details and trust towards the data-collecting institution are of particularly high importance in healthcare.