In comments closing the University of Pennsylvania's first annual
Connected Health Symposium, Penn Health System CEO Ralph Muller hailed the new technologies but cautioned that "connected" health can only work if patients accept it. "This technology obviously has broad ramifications for how medicine is practiced," said Muller, who oversees a $4 billion-a-year regional network of hospitals and clinics. "We're going to have powerful 24/7 streams of patient information but we need to ask ourselves, 'how are patients going to react to that?' One of the things we have to be thinking about is how to maintain effective human contact at the same time this powerful information becomes available to us."