Hot Topic: Technology Innovation and Healthcare

Todd Cooper has been a medical-device software architect for more than 20 years. As President of Breakthrough Solutions Foundry Inc., he has focused his activities on standards-based medical-device connectivity, helping companies sort out the standards organization landscape and determine how to best position their products. He has been focusing recently on point-of-care integration with a real-time medical-device plug-and-play profile.

      
IEEE: How does healthcare standards development in telemedicine affect people living in remote areas?

      
Cooper: Standards development in telemedicine does account for the needs of those living in remote areas. In the past, a lot of one-off projects, say in a remote region of Africa, were often abandoned soon after the project arrived. There’s been a lot of effort in recent years to try to come up with solutions and technology that address these needs, and do so in a way that’s sustainable. In places like Africa, Canada, and other countries where you have vast areas in which people are away from medical technology centers, it’s a big deal. 

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