Dr. Eric Topol Joins The Wide Open Road Of mHealth As AT&T As Chief Medical Advisor

Last fall Verizon announced FDA approval for their Converged Health Management System, a remote patient monitoring platform to connect doctors with patient vitals using HIPPA level security. Now AT&T is upping the ante, announcing the appointment of Eric Topol, MD as Chief Medical Advisor, in charge of design, development and delivery of the company’s healthcare IT solutions.

Healthcare IT is a loosely defined field including everything from prescription drug tracking and appointment setting, to remote health monitoring and patient consultation, and right now it’s all falling under the banner of mobile healthcare or mHealth. While still a great innovation, providers quickly discovered that tons of patient-provided data could be overwhelming without a structure to assess the data within a workflow. Some physicians aren’t even sure they want to be required to process all the data available via non-FDA approved apps, and express concern that patients could become overly dependent on their personal interpretation of data available for their viewing. Call it the WedMD effect, but doctors don’t have time to talk down every patient who’s become a self-approved medical expert.