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How The Internet Of Things Will Change Health Care

Jump ARCHES
Health professionals developing monitoring technology for patients.

One of the leaders of an expanding health care technology partnership in Illinois says their work will lead to better outcomes for patients in rural areas.

OSF HealthCare is collaborating with University of Illinois' Grainger College of Engineering to research and implement health monitoring technology in rural areas of Illinois and beyond. The Jump ARCHES partnership, first established in 2013, recently received a major gift from the DiSomma Foundation to grow its endowment past $100 million.

“There are significant populations of people across America who really need good connection with health and wellness. And our endowment now funds technologies to connect people to health and wellness technologies, keep them healthier, keep them well and do the preventative measures that will lead to better outcomes for those patients and people who live in those rural communities,” said Dr. John Vozenilek, vice president and chief medical officer of Jump Trading and Simulation Center in Peoria.

OSF says the new donations will help Jump ARCHES usher in the future of health care—a future that will include at-home assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, robots, mobile sensors, and remote patient monitoring.

Technology could monitor someone's vitals remotely and upload the data to health professionals, who can review and take action as needed. That monitoring technology will also have the capability to make diagnoses and recognize patterns. 

Vozenilek said it will leverage—not substitute—human interaction and diagnosis.

“It allows for our providers and our clinicians, of a variety of types, to actually engage more fully, and really lead to better healthcare outcomes, which is the overarching goal of the Jump ARCHES,” Vozenilek said on WGLT’s Sound Ideas

Human beings are complicated creatures with irregular patterns, but Vozenilek assured that any diagnosis made by a machine would be reviewed by a human being. 

“At the heart of health care and wellness, it is a human-human interaction. This relation is analog to human beings or a team of human beings intervening on behalf of another person. In the design of systems that lead to good information gathering, and good information processing, you have to have solid foundation and user-centered design and human-centered design. Then the computers can actually make good sense of the data that they're acquiring,” said Vozenilek.

Vozenilek said the partnership hopes this will be the beginning of similar programs nationwide if not globally. OSF says Jump ARCHES has already funded 34 "groundbreaking" projects in the past five years, including the creation of startups Enduvo and AirV Labs. 

“The key here is that we have combined disciplines that are unexpected and unique ways to deliver new interventions for our patients on behalf of outcomes,” said Vozenilek.

Hear Vozenilek's full interview with WGLT's Charlie Schlenker:

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WGLT Senior Reporter Charlie Schlenker has spent more than three award-winning decades in radio. He lives in Normal with his family.
Katie Seelinger is an intern in the GLT newsroom.