How Mobile Collaboration Can Change Condition Management

Yesterday, Microsoft invested in Zula, a mobile collaboration app. This was a smart move and matches a growing trend of employers placing higher value in communication and teamwork as skills. I've always loved the concept — highly configurable, temporal teams align with Centric Digital's agile approach for engaging with our clients. Many of us have built traditional and digital businesses with the help of a small team of experts.

We have only begun to scratch the surface as to how digital can better enable the concept of a team. Whether working to audit the digital ecosystem of a Fortune 500 company, working on a pharmaceutical breakthrough or helping someone manage a chronic condition like diabetes, the power of small expert teams that are digitally connected holds great promise.

There’s a lot of talk now days about condition management in healthcare, that is, understanding when I have a certain condition (diabetes for example) and beginning to proactively manage that condition through a series of support tools. Digital communities are often put forth as one possible method for people to find information, identify resources, and even have a “support group.” But when it comes to actually managing that condition, mobile collaboration with a personal small group of experts could drastically improve condition management.

This team could consist of individuals across multiple disciplines connected via a mobile collaboration app. Each expert could interact with the patient and other team members to provide management support and diagnose issues before they become problems. With the dawning of wearable technology in the health field, self condition management is becoming easier, and it stands to reason that access to your doctors and management team will take that biometric information even further. Alarming biometric data could be pushed from the piece of wearable tech to each member of the team for quick diagnosis, intervention, and prevention of larger problems, perhaps reducing hospital and emergency room visits.