Jonathan Leviss, MD, FACP, is the senior vice president and medical director of AMC Health, a provider of real-time patient management solutions. He has more than 15 years of experience leveraging technology and informatics to transform healthcare by improving patient and provider experiences, advancing population health and reducing the cost of care. Prior to joining AMC Health, he was chief medical officer at the Rhode Island Quality Institute, overseeing development of CurrentCare (Rhode Island’s Health Information Exchange) and the RI Regional Extension Center, and leading technology adoption for the RI Beacon Community. Before RIQI, he was vice president and chief medical officer at Sentillion and the first chief medical informatics officer at NYC Health and Hospitals.
He is a primary care physician at Thundermist Health Center in Rhode Island and Clinical Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. He regularly writes and speaks on health information technology, physician leadership and innovation in healthcare. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Tufts University and MD from the NYU School of Medicine.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. mHealth enables providers to more closely monitor and care for patients, without requiring the patients to physically go to the provider’s office or other location.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. Vital sign monitors, weight scales, glucose monitors, medication and care plan compliance monitors and interactive patient assessments for pain, clinical symptoms and behavioral health will become ubiquitous. Video and telehealth visits will also become more common. These technologies already exist, and now health plans and providers share incentives, along with patients, to take advantage of their benefits.
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. As a practicing primary care physician, I’m most excited by any technology that helps patients better manage their own health and wellness and can easily share information with their care team when needed.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. Auscultation devices (stethoscopes) will be replaced by ultrasound and other visualization tools - this will occur both in telehealth as well as “in-person” healthcare.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend has surprised you the most, either with its success or its failure?
A. I am consistently surprised by the high compliance rates we see with mHealth self-monitoring. It’s encouraging to see patients so motivated to check and report blood pressure, weight changes, glucose and other data, and to want to learn to manage these changes themselves.
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. Providers will not be organized effectively to take advantage of mHealth - we are still mainly a “pay-for-volume” health system focused on provider-centric care. For efficient and patient-centric care to occur in a patient’s home, involving nurses and other members of an interdisciplinary care team, providers need to be paid differently. The whole health system will need time to make this change, although individual groups have demonstrated that some can change rapidly.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" – consumers, providers or some other party?
A. Payers enable it to happen, and consumers and providers step up to take advantage of the new approaches and create their own versions. Ultimately, consumers will demand mHealth and some providers will require it.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. Like most of us in healthcare, at AMC Health we are looking at the data. What can we learn from remote monitoring patient data? Are there different warnings for adverse clinical outcomes than with the traditional data we collect in a provider’s office? Do certain blood pressure values, heart rates or other combinations of symptoms, signs and behaviors indicate a heightened risk of stroke, heart attack or other clinical deterioration that needs proactive intervention? How can patients become part of this monitoring effort?
