The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 6 (Dec 2014) | Page 34

Tackling the Myths about Patient Data & Use of Technology with mHealth

Tackling the Myths
about Patient Data
and Use of Technology
with mHealth

By Keith Nurcombe

Keith Nurcombe has worked in healthcare for over twenty years spending the last few years working with businesses in the health and technology space, most
recently building O2 Health where he was Managing Director until the end of 2012, since then he has been providing consultancy services to businesses.
I recently sat at a conference in the UK
and heard some of the same statements
that I have heard in the past rear their
heads again, I had hoped they had been
dealt with and we had moved on but it
would appear not.
"We don't want to collect too much data about
the patient we wouldn’t know what to do with it,
it would swamp us, and besides we don't need it.”
Clearly when it comes to collecting
patient data, both information that the
process has collected in an automated
fashion but also information entered by
the patient, we have to make sure that this
data is encrypted and delivered into the
appropriate locations safely and securely,
while also be cognisant to the fact that
we are holding sensitive data about the
patient. However, here is where it gets
interesting for me, too many people say
‘we don’t want lots of data just tell me
the following things and I don’t need the
rest.’
At no point has Amazon or Google, just
to name a couple, decided to stop col-

lecting data about my usage on the internet when searching for things or when
shopping. They haven’t gone – ‘oh look
we have too much data about Keith’s
shopping habits lets stop collecting it
now we know all there is to know about
him.’
No, they continue to collect the data ]