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CTIA Panel: Meet the Wireless Health Leaders

Tim Gee, Principal, Medical Connectivity Consulting, was kind enough to write-up the first sessions at our Everywhere Healthcare event last week at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment event in San Diego last week. What follows is Tim’s notes from the session (including some commentary from him in parenthetical asides.)

Brian Dolan, co-founder and editor of MobiHealthNews kicked off the event by highlighting some of the key wireless health stories that MobiHealthNews has published over the past several months. MobiHealthNews’ most emailed story to date is an interview with Scott Eising, director of product management for Mayo Clinic’s Internet Services. Another hot story was Aetna’s repurposing online content through an iPhone app. Last week, MobiHealthNews ran a story about Safeway and their practice of providing financial bonuses to employees maintain a “healthy” BMI, lower cholesterol, or improve their health in other ways. Another article of note described CardioNet’s plans to extend its business model beyond ambulatory cardiac arrhythmia diagnostic testing to chronic disease management. This past summer, MobiHealthNews reported on Best Buy’s push to become a channel for providing wireless health to consumers. At TEPR+, Brian reported on comments made by FDA scientist Don Witters. During his presentation, Don suggested that the iPhone could indeed meet the legal definition of a regulated medical device.

The first session following Brian’s presentation was a panel discussion, titled “Meet the Wireless Health Leaders.” The panel included Kent Dicks, CEO, MedApps; Don Jones, VP, Health & Life Sciences, Qualcomm; Mike Srivathsa, VP, Corventis; David Inns, CEO, GreatCall/JitterBug; Jon Linkous, founding CEO American Telemedicine Association; and Rob McCray, Chairman, Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance moderated the session.

Rob noted that the panel intended to represent the wireless health landscape. Rob characterized the wireless health opportunity as a way to target under served populations — the uninsured in the US, in addition to those in developing markets around the world. Don Jones described wireless health as the ability to present the right information and interaction, with the right person (patient or provider), in the right place and at the right time. He suggested that “monitoring” itself does not play a big role presently, but noted that numerous sensor technologies are coming to market. He characterized these medical sensors as “accessories” — a term with important FDA regulatory implications.

Rob asked the ATA’s Jon Linkous to list the key questions that concern taking health care services outside the walls of the hospital. Jon noted that wireless health is transformative, compared to typical evolutionary technology advancements in health care. He noted that Congress is struggling with this transformation, especially in the context of health reform. Questions include whether reform will leverage wireless health through reimbursement, or whether it will quash the market through cuts in care expenditures. The FTC is also looking into the implication of wireless health and how it impacts the delivery of health care across the borders of both states and countries.

Jitterbug’s David Inns talked about the self pay market in health care. The 65-year-old and older demographic represent a majority of health care costs, Inns said. The iPhone is a great product, but it is not going to make an impact on that demographic. This group requires considerably more customer service and support than typical consumer electronics products, Inns said. The Jitterbug platform is growing through the addition of “services,” as opposed to “apps” or new hardware accessories.

CTIA: Virtual tour of Wireless Health Pavilion

Last week at the CTIA Wireless IT & E event in San Diego, close to 30 wireless health companies exhibited their wares on the show floor. For those readers who were not in attendance and for those looking for a round-up of the companies on-site, we put together a slide show describing each of the companies exhibiting.

The companies range in size from established tech companies to wireless health start-ups just coming out of stealth mode. Their products range from wireless sensors, health services, remote monitoring technology and more. Enjoy this virtual stroll through the Wireless Health Pavilion in the slides to follow…

FDA: Who owns health data? No easy answer.

At the Body Computing Conference last week in Los Angeles, the Food and Drug Association’s Brian Fitzgerald weighed in on a big question: Who owns your health data? According to a report in Fast Company, the typical answer most consumers would provide is “my body, my data.” Fitzgerald, however, had an insightful and perhaps troubling reply. It made for a true regulatory monkey wrench:

“These are very durable, intractable problems,” Fitzgerald reportedly said at the conference. “If I share data with you because we’re playing a game, years later that data could be used against me. Where does my privacy end? Do I have the right to share a personal genetic profile? That profile doesn’t just affect me. It affects future generations — they didn’t give me the right to share that profile with you. It’s necessary to rethink the very fundamental models of what we do and try to calibrate for the 21st century technologies.”

Seems like the FDA has had a busy year — in February we reported that the FDA was just beginning its conversation with the wireless health industry. While that conversation may have only led to more questions so far, they are compelling ones.

For more on Fitzgerald’s comments, read the Fast Company report here.

Corventis, USC create Beating Heart game

At the Body Computing Conference last week in Los Angeles, wireless health company Corventis demonstrated a concept iPhone app called Beating Heart, which the company created with the event’s organizers. The app is a game that leverages Corventis’ wireless “band-aid” sensor to transmit the players heart rate to the iPhone, which then can broadcast the heart rate over Twitter and Facebook or via text message or email. By using Bluetooth, the concept app also demonstrates that players can get a snapshot of nearby players’ heart rates in real-time.

The concept app aimed to demonstrate the ability for mobile health to become interactive and fun through a social game, and could create social incentives to becoming healthier.

“We were told it wasn’t worth designing for teenagers if there wasn’t a strong self-play piece,” Dr. Leslie Saxon, the Body Computing Conference cofounder and Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at USC, told Fast Company at the event. “So, pretend we’re teenagers and we’re going to broadcast to each other incessantly as we do math homework.”

Here’s how the event organizers described the Beating Heart app: “The Corventis Beating Heart, which was co-developed at USC, draws data wirelessly from a patch placed on the chest. You can then take your heart rate and tag it to your status update on a social network. The concept originated with Dr. Leslie Saxon, conference organizer and chief of cardiology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. She hopes that Beating Heart will educate the next generation of health care users and normalize the idea of monitoring your own body’s information.”

What do you think: Socializing health data to compete with friends? For more on the game, check out the demo video.

Customer-driven, mobile-equipped care system

The Brookings Institute just published a very worthwhile read: Customer-Driven Medicine: How To Create A New Health Care System, by Darrell West that aims to imagine a different healthcare system where the patient is in charge of their own health with help from EMRs, mobile phones, personalized care and more. In this fictitious world, people monitor their own weight, blood pressure, pulse, sugar levels and more by using remote devices and get feedback from the care providers about their progress.

“Patients take responsibility for their routine health care and rely on physicians and hospitals for more serious medical conditions. This system is not a futuristic vision, but is well within our grasp,” West writes.

Interestingly, the crux of the report is not which tools are coming to market or why this opportunity is so ripe — instead, West focuses on the question of “how” this vision might come about. How can we incentivize patients and providers to want to do adopt and drive such a system?

Here’s how: Continue >>

Apple, Epic team up for mobile EHR pilot

“The hottest company in the electronic medical records industry is a secretive Wisconsin outfit called Epic Systems,” a recent Forbes article explained. “It does little marketing or advertising, shuns acquisitions, never issues press releases and tries to stay out of the headlines.”

An EMR company with a penchant for the secretive? No wonder Apple has teamed up with Epic Systems to increase its foray into the healthcare IT space. Here’s another reason: “Yet with a reputation for customer service and software that is more user-friendly than most, Epic has snagged contracts with famous places like the Cleveland Clinic and University of Chicago Medical Center, the big HMO Kaiser Permanente and Group Health Cooperative in Seattle,” Forbes reported. Epic has won about 40 percent of the new contracts for EHRs at major hospitals, according to one estimate from research firm Klas Enterprises.

Microsoft launches My Health Info for MSN

Last week Microsoft launched a beta version of My Health Info, an online health information management service that pulls data from HealthVault but also offers users widgets that help them upload and organize their HealthVault data. As you may expect, the widgets include connections with personal health devices like heart-rate monitors and pedometers. My Health Info is part of MSN.

MSN positions My Health Info as a platform for care givers like parents and adults who take care of aging parents — it’s also aimed at people managing chronic conditions and multiple medications.

By 2020, US will be short 200,000 physicians

During the West Wireless Health Institute open house event earlier last week, presenters noted that by 2020, the U.S. won’t have enough physicians — it will be about 200,000 physicians short, and there are far too few medical schools to make up the difference in the meantime: “Physicians need to be more productive with hours,” Gary West, chairman of the institute told attendees, according to a report in the San Diego Business Journal.

Another metric that came out of the event: The wireless health care industry is expected to grow into a nearly $2 billion sector during the next five years — an impressive sum, possibly the highest figure we’ve seen yet for that time period.

“This is the biggest change — operating instructions at earlier age. [Wireless health] tools can help achieve prevention,” said Donald Jones, chief wireless officer for the West institute and vice president of health and life sciences at Qualcomm. “It’s remarkable innovation.”

Read the full write-up from the SDBJ here

Wireless to make telemedicine a $3.6B market

According to a recent report from Pike & Fischer, the market for telemedicine devices and services will climb to $3.6 billion in annual revenue over the next five years largely thanks for a push from wireless technologies, data compression and smartphones. Telemedicine will be dominated by wireless technologies during that time period: More than 70 percent of telemedicine will be wireless healthcare, according to the report.

The research firm predicts that wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel will become key players in the increasingly wireless-enabled telemedicine market, while smaller companies like software developers and device makers will be key acquisition targets. AT&T is likely to dominate, however, the report predicted. The firm also points to the need to control health care costs as another driver of the growing telemedicine market, while stimulus funding from ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) will lead to more remote patient monitoring services and mobile access to EHRs, according to Pike & Fischer.

FDA’s processes too slow for wireless health

“With the FDA recently saying too many [medical] devices are getting approved too easily and some other things they are articulating, it’s frustrating,” Montage Systems CEO Eric Collins said during a panel session at the CTIA Wireless IT & E event last week.

Montage is still awaiting FDA approval of its Wireless Healthphone, which is meant to send patient data wirelessly to doctors and other caregivers. Healthphone includes blood glucose monitoring functionality but also has a planned ability to alert diabetis to foreign objects entering their shoes since some diabetics lose sensation in their feet. An orthotic device inserted into the patient’s shoe would notify wearer if a stone of something else entered the shoe that could cause a sore.

According to Collins, the emerging wireless health industry “has a huge opportunity to improve the health care system and reduce costs, but Washington is clearly not paying attention to technology at this level.”

For more on the panel Collins was speaking on last week, read this article from ComputerWorld

AT&T inks deal with Vitality for GlowCaps

AT&T has inked a deal to let Vitality’s smart pillbox cap offering, GlowCaps, run on its wireless network. The service is a medication reminder and compliance service: GlowCaps fit the standard pill container top as a new, smart lid that uses short-range wireless technology to monitor when a pillbox is open and when it isn’t. It uses a close-range wireless signal to connect to a gateway hub in the home — the gateway looks like a night light, but it includes the guts of a mobile phone. That repackaged mobile phone technology runs on AT&T’s network.

Here’s how it works: If the bottle isn’t opened at the appointed time, the cap and night light start blinking to remind the owner to take the medication. If that doesn’t serve as enough of a hint, they start playing jingles as well. If the bottle stays unopened, the night light will send a message to Vitality’s system, which can then place an automated phone call or send a text message with a reminder.

GlowCaps are also available on Amazon.com for $99 as of a few weeks ago.

Shorts: Google Wave, iTriage, Diabetech

AirWatch-Homecare: AirWatch, which offers enterprise mobile device management software inked a deal with Homecare Homebase to offer the home healthcare company’s workers AirWatch’s Device Link technology to track, monitor and manage point-of-care mobile devices. Device Link is already used on 2,500 home healthcare professionals’ mobile devices in the U.S. More

Google Wave-Google Health: We have written about the potential Google Wave has to change the way Google Health works — here’s one video that illustrates some of that potential: Video and Article

A “clean” list of iPhone medical apps: Tired of sifting through the hundreds of medical iPhone apps to determine which ones are actually useful? Not interested in seeing another list that includes the iPee app? SoftwareAdvice put in the time to separate out the bogus apps and listed more than 700 of the more useful medical apps in a recent feature. Article

iTriage in the wild: At least one hospital has integrated iTriage’s iPhone app into a multi-platform marketing campaign that lets people know wait times for the facility’s emergency room. No iPhone? No problem — any phone with SMS-enabled can receive text messages about wait times, too. Don’t own a mobile phone? There’s also a billboard that displays wait times in real-time. More

Cinterion-Diabetech: Cinterion Wireless Modules, a cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communication module developer has teamed up with Diabetech, a developer of patient-centric health care programs to create the fourth generationGlucoMON platform. They call it “the world’s easiest-to-use wireless diabetes management system.” Check out the full press release here for more.

Beetles, Levis, mHealth: New report from UK researcher Peter Kruger, whose firm is called Wireless Healthcare, came out today: “There are already up to 30 million potential alpha daughters, providing some level of care for their parents in the US today. mHealth could become the last big consumer market created by the sixties generation.” That’s an interesting hook, but the press release does not include any other new metrics — it does, however, predict mobile health will follow on the success of Levi jeans and VW Beetles… hmm. More