Using Technology to Connect Healthcare and Health & Fitness [Podcast Series]

• [:54] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Ryan Eder

  • CEO/Founder of IncludeHealth, a digital health and wellness company leveraging design, technology and data to transform rehabilitation and wellness.

• [1:10]  Vision for IncludeHealth 

  • “It's always been purely through the lens of lowering barriers for people to stay active and healthy. And it started through the lens of physical accessibility.”

• [3:00]  Evolution of IncludeHealth

  • “Throughout your life you go in and out of the healthcare system and a lot of the health issues that people are experiencing and trying to navigate as well...it broadened our horizon to just being able to develop this technology that we can serve anyone across that spectrum and not isolate it to a certain moment in time.”

• [3:51]  Improving health through the lens of a designer

  • “I boil it all down to empathy, and trying to look at the world through someone else's eyes. And so looking at that as an individual trying to stay healthy, trying to stay active...to the trainers or practitioners delivering personal training or rehab or care...to the administrators...to the health plans, look at the entire system.”  

• [5:31] Health & fitness clubs opening their doors to people living with disability

  • “It's a mindset of everyone in there knowing that your services are for everyone. And removing the stigmas that a lot of people just inadvertently have about, like assuming based off of someone's appearance or their abilities that they are interested or can do certain things or cannot do other things, right? It simply isn't the case.”

• [7:04] Challenges and opportunities in integrating healthcare and health & fitness

  • “I think the fitness industry has always seen the potential there and wanted to be able to collaborate, but you need to have that other side willing to answer the call. So you need those incentives to get aligned.”

  • “And the opportunities are big. So when all of a sudden you have the entire world stop, and everybody is reassessing and reevaluating, then you start realizing the opportunities for the providers, like the healthcare organizations that are interested in delivering more convenient, extended care beyond their brick and mortar.” 

• [10:10] Using technology to facilitate physician exercise referral and feedback

  • “So we built the platform starting completely in the walls of healthcare, of understanding, how do you have an authoring tool to create medically driven digital protocols that can be delivered anywhere that is connected to the platform.”

• [15:46] Collaboration among professionals caring for the patient

  • “What's really exciting is this technology can really make that collaboration quite seamless.  So you are able to connect organizations that historically haven't been able to be connected.” 

• [17:52] Incorporating exercise into daily life in a community-based setting

  • “Being able to have this connected care, health and wellness at any location at any time is just really powerful.”

• [21:36] Progression from equipment to cloud to movement sensors

  • “And so that's really that insight that pushed us to develop IncludeConnect and these sensors that we can now connect any equipment. And that is what opened up when you start saying, Okay, this is a piece of equipment, this is a platform, I can connect facilities within my network, I can connect out of network facilities.”

• [25:08] Impacting population health

  • “You're right, it has to be accessible to everyone. And to do that, I mean, you need to really break the barriers of technology even further. Not requiring specific equipment, not requiring a specific device, being able to have this connected, where it goes with you, wherever you are any of your devices, where you can get this programming, you can continue your journey and it all feeds back and can then weave into the operational needs of the stakeholders involved.”

• [28:47] Impact of COVID-19 on vision 

  • “Any technology company is really trying to be an agent of change. And there is no greater agent of change than a global pandemic. Everyone's so much more aware of their personal health and wellness than they ever would have been before. I mean, I think it does create a really unique opportunity on the other side.”