Qualcomm Life is building the future of health care

SAN FRANCISCO — Don Jones is a vice president for Qualcomm Life who’s on a mission to make the future of health care a reality.

The Qualcomm Foundation houses a healthcare investment fund, grooms master’s degree programs in wireless health, and sponsors the Tricorder X Prize, dubbed “health care in the palm of your hand” (and apparently a product Jones proposed himself.)

Jones is also leading the Scripps Clinical Efficacy Center for trials involving connected clinical solutions. As we’ve heard throughout HealthBeat 2013, entrepreneurs should understand clinical workflows to test the adoptability of their health technology solutions before attempting to make inroads into a system already fraught with problems.

Jones was joined onstage by Susan Dentzer, a former health correspondent for the PBS News Hour and senior policy adviser for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The two compared the coming changes in health care technology to a shift as drastic from horse and buggy to cars.

But what exactly does the future hold? According to Jones and Dentzer, it’s health care on demand.

Jones said, “Once you have health care on demand, you don’t want to go back … you won’t accept anything less.”

Both payers and providers will have to compete to attract patients, thus shifting markets based on new value propositions facilitated by technology. In rapid-fire succession, Jones described a system that is “smarter, faster, cheaper, more convenient, and more transparent for the patient.”

And Qualcomm isn’t just talk. The company has partnered with Stanford University to offer these types of connected health care services to all of its employees, located in 100-plus locations operating on a 24/7 schedule.

Qualcomm Life is focused on making “immediate response” something embraced by both technology companies and the healthcare industry alike by dictating the terms for what a future health system should be.

Photo: Don Jones of Qualcomm Life and Susan Dentzer of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat