One of my early encounters with technology and healthcare came at a cable industry event. It was the 2009 NCTA Cable Show in Washington, DC, if memory serves, in the early days of DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts. The demo was a live, two-way video with a doctor in Alaska. That iteration of DOCSIS could support some compelling new applications, including the remote delivery of medical service.

A decade later we had more high-speed data, including DOCSIS 3.1, with its 10x increase in downstream and upstream throughputs. In the introduction to their book on ARRIS (a book I helped write), Bob Stanzione and Dave Potts pointed out how this class of technology had changed life at large. “Imagine how the world would have been in 2020,” they wrote, regarding that pandemic year, “without cost-effective, wide-scale deployment of high-speed data to work from home, shop from home and even engage with medical professionals from home.” The COVID crisis accelerated the use of telehealth, but the infrastructure was already laid.

In addition to what I knew about data networking, I’ve acquired more understanding of healthcare technology, in some cases through personal experience. Having undergone a few episodes of cardiac arrythmia earlier in my life, I gave the Sonohealth Portable EKG Heart Rate Monitor a try and found it much more convenient than the clunky Holter monitors I’d worn on occasion. Like millions of others, I bought a smart watch, generating more health-related metrics. I also thought about who else had access to these data and became interested in electronic health records.

On a professional level, the digitization of healthcare has given me a lot to write about. A large data services provider asked me to help them with four high-level white papers on healthcare. Then they added six more, on themes like resilience, workforce, and innovation. For another client, I’ve been writing about their research on a cardiovascular bio-digital twin. (See one example here, along with work from their other two labs.) Meanwhile, I’ve kept track of a few companies engaged with this sector. At HIMSS 2023 Global Health Conference and Exhibition, for instance, CommScope (formerly ARRIS) demonstrated a “System for Better Care at Home.”

There are many angles to healthcare technology. Cable modems, cloud architectures, database interfaces and management systems, sensors and monitors, wireless LANs, high-speed WANs, to name a few components, all enveloped within secure frameworks and compliant with HIPAA and other relevant regulations. They can be interesting puzzles, with the sometimes added benefit of directly impacting you and me.