Is mHealth at the Peak of Inflated Expectations?

Thursday - September 2nd, 2010 - 07:31am EST by Brian Dolan | | |  |

Brian Dolan, Editor, MobiHealthNewsAt the beginning of the summer, the American Telemedicine Association’s President Jon Linkous wrote a somewhat scathing critique of the hype that surrounded (and continues to surround) all things mHealth. This past week Eric Dishman, an Intel Fellow and director of health innovation and policy for Intel’s Digital Health Group, argued convincingly that right now mHealth is at the apex of the hype cycle:

“This well-intentioned but premature celebration of all things ‘mHealth’ may come back to bite us, if we’re not more careful,” Dishman wrote in his rant, entitled The Hype and Hope of mHealth. Dishman broke his primary concerns down into three buckets: The vaguity of the term “mHealth,” a clear failing to “manage expectations” for mHealth, and an inability to get beyond a few very specific mHealth baises.

Vaguity: “If ‘mHealth’ is all of these things and more….if ‘mHealth’ is everything…then it is nothing. The phrase has become so slippery, so ubiquitous as to become almost useless. We must be more careful in defining and aligning what we’re talking about, and I encourage these various workshops and organizers to spend some time clarifying and specifying what’s at play here,” Dishman wrote.

I sympathize with Dishman on this one, really: The semantics around mHealth and wireless health can be confusing or overly broad at times. Navel-gazing, however, is a bigger danger for such a new industry. Language is rarely precise. Debates over the etymology of mHealth vs. wireless health vs. the new term du jour seem much less important than the real issues: Efficacy, business model, regulatory environment, et al. Continue >>

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Kvedar: Three “wild cards” for connected health

Wednesday - September 1st, 2010 - 08:56pm EST by Brian Dolan | | | |  |

Dr. Joseph Kvedar, Center for Connected HealthDr. Joseph Kvedar, the head of the Center for Connected Health, a part of the Partners Health Care system in Boston outlined three “wildcards” that face the connected health industry over the next ten years. Here’s a quick redux:

How far will The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) push “true” payment reform? Health reform instructs CMS and other agencies to study other payment models, but Kvedar points out that these “experiments” have uncertain outcomes so payment reform remains a wildcard.

Will any new care concepts gain enough traction to displace the current “physician is king” model? If not care model innovations will be slow in coming over the next decade.

How much can employers and health plans “bend the cost curve” of healthcare? Can the financial relationship between providers and plans loosen up in the coming years?

Be sure to read through Kvedar’s full column over at his cHealth Blog.

Alere to market a second wireless fetal monitor

Wednesday - September 1st, 2010 - 08:41pm EST by Brian Dolan | | | | | | |  |

AirStrip TechnologiesDéjà vu all over again? Alere Health, formerly known as Inverness Medical Innovations inked a distribution deal with a wireless remote fetal monitoring company. In March Alere signed on to promote UK-based Monica Healthcare’s wireless fetal monitoring system. This week, it’s AirStripOB.

AirStrip Technologies, which is known for having one of the very first FDA approved iPhone apps (AirStripOB), has inked a deal with Alere that sees Alere leveraging its marketing and distribution channels to promote AirStripOB to its healthcare provider client base.

AirStrip OB captures vital patient waveform data, including fetal heart tracing and maternal contraction patterns, in “virtual real time” and sends it to the physician’s mobile device.

“AirStrip Technologies is moving into the home health arena to monitor multiple clinical scenarios,” AirStrip Technologies Chief Sales Officer Bruce Brandes stated. “The AirStrip-Alere agreement delivers a partnership to the market that combines great technology with great experience, coupled with Alere’s compelling history of improving outcomes for pregnant women and their children.”

AirStrip also recently received FDA clearance for another wireless remote monitoring service: AirStrip RPM, which includes critical care and cardiac monitoring.

More on the deal here

UK red tape bars iPhone medical devices

Wednesday - September 1st, 2010 - 08:54am EST by Brian Dolan | | | | | | |  |

Red TapeIs wireless health regulation just as grey in the UK and other parts of Europe as it is in the US?

“It’s much easier to develop technology than it is to get permission to use it,” Peter Bentley, the inventor of an iPhone app that supposedly turns the device into a stethoscope, told the UK’s Guardian in a recent interview. Bentley, a researcher at the University College London, believes that innovation is being stifled by regulators in Europe: “I could create a mobile ultrasound scanner and an application to measure the oxygen content in blood, but the regulations stop me. We’re not allowed to turn the phone itself into a medical device, and what that precisely means is currently a grey area in terms of regulation. That’s the only reason we’re not seeing a flood of these devices yet.”

Bentley’s perspective is shared by Professor Ian Wells, head of the scientific computing section in the department of medical physics at the Royal Surrey County hospital in Guildford: ”The approach of the regulators is not well worked out yet. There’s a wonderful new world out there but we need to find a way for regulators to protect patients and doctors, while not impeding innovation, research and development,” he told The Guardian.

The Guardian reported that a consortium of regulators from a number of European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Sweden and the UK convened late last year to develop guidance for software regulations under European Medical Device Regulations — a report is expected by year-end. Continue >>

Amazon Kindle for MDs and more mHealth news

Wednesday - September 1st, 2010 - 08:27am EST by Brian Dolan | | | | | | | | | | |  |

Zoll Medical PocketCPRKindle for MDs: Sussing out whether the Amazon Kindle eBook reader is a good tool for physicians. Less distractions than an iPad? Meaningful Uses

Text4Baby Update: Text4Baby, a one-way, free text message service for new and expecting moms timed to their due date or baby’s date of birth is still picking up new subscribers across the US: 72,000 Text4Baby users to date and 3.5 million messages sent. Here’s how the program “avoided cost, privacy, content and HIPPA issues.” Adlibbing.com

AD powers Zoll’s CPR device: Analog Devices announced that Zoll Medical’s palm-sized, mobile CPR training device is powered by one of its accelerometers. MedGadget

Wireless tracking via baby’s onesy: McLean, Virginia-based Exmovere announced a new baby monitor that uses “smart” clothing in the form of a baby’s onesy to monitor the infants heart rate, “emotional state”, and level of activity. The information is then transmitted wireless to a computer or cell phone. MedGadget

Nurse scheduling: Interview with Matthew Browning and his now 10-year-old startup Your Nurse Is On: Our offering “is a Software as a Service (SaaS) product that helps allocate the right healthcare staff, where they are needed, when they are needed there, by instant, 2-way text, phone and/or email communications. We are a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that allows for quick and easy adoption, keeps customer costs low and removes their maintenance responsibilities.” Anytime, always on nurse scheduling, read more at Manage My Practice

County in California is tracking preschoolers with chip-equipped jerseys. California Watch

Was mobile key to Ebix’s $66M ADAM buy?

Tuesday - August 31st, 2010 - 11:16am EST by Brian Dolan | | | | | | | | |  |

A.D.A.M. Medzio AppEbix, an international supplier of on demand software and ecommerce services to the insurance industry has agreed to acquire and merge with medical education software developer ADAM in a deal valued at about $66 million, according to the companies.

ADAM’s recent activity in mobile health may suggest one reason a company focused on the insurance industry acquired it: Just last week Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based health insurance provider Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield launched an iPhone app, Health@Hand, co-developed with ADAM and based on its Medzio application.

ADAM’s Medzio app was once called a “super app” because it is a rollup of other popular apps and offerings from big name partners including: CallMD, Dr. Greene, Health 2.0, Healthcare Blue Book, HealthiNation, HelloHealth, Livestrong, Norton Healthcare and Organized Wisdom. Medzio offers symptom navigation, first aid info, GPS-enabled local listings for care centers (with maps and directions) and more. Medzio encapsulated ADAM’s short term mobile strategy but the company had longterm plans for the mobile platform.

Here’s how ADAM’s SVP of Product Strategy Greg John summed up the mobile health opportunity for ADAM in an interview with MobiHealthNews back in March 2009:

“We think that with the iPhone, for the first time mobile phones are an extension of the desktop computer. They aren’t the same as a desktop, though–you aren’t going to use your mobile phone to research a potentially serious condition you may have. You aren’t going to sit there and read volumes of information about it from a phone. We have that type of information and if you have multiple sclerosis, you can go to A.D.A.M. and read about it, but you’re going to want to sit at a computer and do that instead of thumbing through a little screen. What a mobile phone is for is really convenient access to health information wherever you need and wherever you are–we all understand that.”

“First and foremost, the cell phone is a communication device, so tying together health information you might need in a particular point in time–like a symptom–with the ability to make a phone call and things get interesting. Add in GPS functionalities so you can locate care facilities for consumers to actually call, and I think you have a powerful suite of services for consumers on the go.”

For more of our coverage on ADAM:

Interview: ADAM from CD-ROMs to iPhones
A.D.A.M. Medzio app launches for iPhone
Highmark BCBS taps ADAM for iPhone app
CallMD joins ADAM’s Mobile Health Network