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Why the Qualcomm Life 2net launch matters
 Qualcomm has been developing its wireless health strategy for the past decade – grooming health startups along the way, supporting a number of major mobile health events, co-founding various wireless health industry associations, and lobbying policymakers on the pertinent issues. That makes its announcement this week all the more important. It also means the industry should take note of its timing. Why now? Because, after a decade of planning, Qualcomm apparently thinks that the time is right.
This week it launched a major initiative: Qualcomm Life, a new, wholly-owned subsidiary of the company, focused on wireless health. It’s first product: 2net.
“2net is a cloud-based end-to-end connectivity platform that enables us to get the data to a place where it can be accessible to application developers, service providers, and other device manufacturers,” Qualcomm Life’s Vice President and General Manager Rick Valencia told MobiHealthNews in a recent interview.
“This is an enabling platform,” Qualcomm’s Vice President of wireless health, global strategy and market development Don Jones told MobiHealthNews. “It’s a b-to-b play from Qualcomm and the implication down the road here is not only making it easy to connect things to the Internet for a single device but also to make it easy for any one patient to have multiple devices simultaneously connected, simultaneously sending information, to a backend system that provides software interfaces that enable patients to self-manage and share information about their health conditions.” It’s also designed to meet HIPAA security requirements and is ISO 13485 certified.
Few companies have been as instrumental in guiding the development of the budding mobile health industry as Qualcomm, which is why its move to create a new wholly-owned subsidiary focused exclusively on wireless health this week was the biggest news to come out of the mHealth Summit.
Along with the 2net platform, Qualcomm Life is offering up four ways to connect health devices and medical information to the new platform. Qualcomm describes these as the four “gateways” to connecting to their platform: through a Class I FDA-listed, standalone gateway called the 2net Hub; an embedded cellular connectivity component; medical data sent from mobile phones; an API that enables service integration between the 2net platform and a service provider’s own platform.
The 2net Hub is designed to be very easy to use. For one, it’s a nightlight, which is reminiscent of the gateway used by Vitality for its GlowCap medication adherence offering. When the 2net hub device is plugged in and it connects to the patient’s health device a light turns on to indicate the connection. Qualcomm said it plans to work with device manufacturers to ship the hub with the device so the two (or more) devices are pre-paired.
Qualcomm said that the 2net hub is the best gateway for health devices that require episodic downloading of information instead of continuous or near-real-time data transmissions. Embedding cellular makes sense for devices that require more frequent data transmissions and for data that needs to be acted upon quickly — typically critical care applications.
During the past year it seems a new connected health device or platform has launched each week. Take your pick of wireless connectivity options — Bluetooth, WiFi, ANT+, 3G — and you can find at least one personal health device for managing each of the major chronic condition that leverages it.
“The hub enables us to wirelessly enable existing devices that are in the market today without requiring manufacturers to go back through a development cycle or back through an FDA clearance process,” Valencia said. Some medical device companies with Bluetooth-enabled devices in the market have a many patient users that have never leveraged their device’s connectivity because they don’t have WiFi or other means of connectivity at home. “This hub can connect those devices,” Valencia said.
Some of the 40 companies that have already signed on as partners for Qualcomm Life include: A&D Medical, Advanced Warning Systems, AirStrip Technologies, Asthmapolis, AT&T, BiancaMed, BodyMedia, Emergency Medical Services Corporation, Entra Health Systems, Ingram Micro, MidMark Corporation, Hello Health, Nonin Medical, Numera, ResMed, U.S. Preventive Medicine and Venture Corporation.
The Qualcomm Life 2net platform is currently available in the US, but the company plans to offer it in Europe sometime next year.
Qualcomm also launched a new $100 million fund carved out of Qualcomm Ventures and specifically set aside for wireless health investments. Five previous investments will be moved into the new fund, including Sotera Wireless, Telcare, AliveCor, Cambridge Temperature Concepts and WorkSmart Labs. That group already includes a wide variety of startups working in and around fitness, remote patient monitoring, chronic condition management, fertility issues, and more.
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FDA OKs Sanofi-AgaMatrix iPhone glucometer
This morning on the last day of the mHealth Summit, Dr. William Maisel, the deputy director and chief scientist of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health told attendees that today the FDA had cleared the first iPhone glucose meter. Maisel made the comment off-handedly, according to MobiHealthNews contributing editor Neil Versel, who was in attendance. Maisel also did not name the device or the company behind it.
In an email to MobiHealthNews, a representative from Sanofi confirmed that the AgaMatrix Nugget was the iPhone glucose meter that Maisel had referenced and that the device now has FDA 510(k) clearance.
Sanofi has long planned to sell the AgaMatrix Nugget (also called the iGBStar) in the United States. It began offering the device in Europe earlier this year.
“iBGStar is the first available blood glucose meter that seamlessly connects to the iPhone and iPod touch allowing you to view and analyse accurate, reliable information in ‘real time,’” Sanofi Aventis stated in September 2010 on the website for the device. “Using the technology built into your iPhone or iPod touch, you can share this information with your healthcare professional while on-the-go, to help you make better-informed diabetes-related decisions together.” At the time AgaMatrix had expected the device to become commercially available in the US in either January or February of this year. Instead, the companies have waited an additional 11 months as the FDA put the device through its regulatory ringer.
Similarly, iPhone imaging app developer MIM had to wait about two years for the FDA to clear its diagnostic medical app, Mobile MIM. In February of this year, MIM’s app became the first diagnostic imaging app to receive FDA clearance.
As of this writing the iPhone companion app for the AgaMatrix Nugget device is not yet available on the Apple AppStore.
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| “An unnamed payer, I heard, has got 30 companies in the pipeline that they want to acquire.“
- Dr Mohit Kaushal, co-manager,
West Health Investment Fund
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| Investor: Payor plans to acquire 30 health startups
“Most [acquisitions] in healthcare get done between $100 million and $200 million,” Radius Ventures Partner Dan Lubin told attendees at the mHealth Summit during a panel session this past week. “Most deals are under $100 million — that is the exit… I think we can build companies, make them really attractive, and sell them to strategics for $100 million. I think that’s a four to [six year] time frame. If we want to build billion dollar companies — and healthcare has billion dollar companies [usually biotech and sometimes medtech] — well, that’s going to take longer. It all depends on how much money you plow in and how long you are willing to wait.”
While Lubin allowed for the possibility of billion dollar valuations in the future, he said that he does not expect to see a company in mobile or wireless health worth $20 billion or $25 billion.
“I agree,” Mohit Kaushal, the co-manager of the West Health Investment Fund, said. “It’s hard to see something at that value just based on proxies.”
Kaushal, who was formerly part of the team at the FCC that drafted the healthcare chapter of the National Broadband Plan, said that he is a deep believer in market opportunities emerging following a change in regulations or policy. Kaushal said the FCC’s Telecom Act in 1996 created “billions of dollars in value” after it passed.
“I think in healthcare we are at a similar inflection point,” Kaushal said. Then he dropped a bomb: “An unnamed payer, I heard, has got 30 companies in the pipeline that they want to acquire. So, I think in the next five to six years there will be a lot of interesting new companies that emerge from… these exits.”
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Health Q&A startup HealthTap raises $11.5 million
This week at the mHealth Summit HealthTap announced that it closed $11.5 million in its first round of funding after its $2.5 million angel round this past March. The most recent round was led by Tim Chang of the Mayfield Fund, Rowan Chapman of Mohr Davidow Ventures and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt through his Innovation Endeavors fund. The startups plans to use the funds to grow its platform’s reach and recruit new employees.
HealthTap’s $2.5 million angel round, which was announced in March, was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and included participation from Esther Dyson, Mark Leslie, Aaron Patzer (founder and former CEO of Mint.com) and others.
HealthTap lets anyone ask any health question online or via mobile apps and receive answers from US physicians across 100 various medical specialties. HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman told MobiHealthNews in an email that the company’s network of physicians now includes more than 6,000 and the number of healthcare facilities represented tops 500, and includes big names like the Cleveland Clinic and Mount Sinai Hospital.
About 80 percent of US adults go online to look up health information, according to Pew, but very little, if any, of the information they read online comes from their own personal physicians — HealthTap aims to change that. This past September HealthTap announced the launch of two free mobile apps, called HealthTap Express — one for patients and one for physicians. The apps are for iPhone and Android users.
Chang stated that he invested in HealthTap because it “embodies the powerful consumer Internet trend of moving high-value mainstream offline experiences, such as doctor-patient interactions, to the online world,” according the company’s press release. Chang stated that HealthTap “leverages the three key innovation drivers that I’m most excited about: mobile apps that enable new kinds of rich, personalized interactions via smartphone and tablet; gamification that enhances user engagement and retention; and social mechanics, such as expert-based Q&A and reputation graphs, that facilitate deep interest and trust.”
More on the latest round of funding in the press release here: Keep reading>>
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Dr Topol: Haven’t used a stethoscope in 2 years
The future of mHealth is bright, according to West Wireless Health Institute vice chairman Eric Topol, who spoke this week at the opening keynote of the 2011 mHealth Summit. “This is a most momentous moment in medicine,” he told the gathered audience. Topol’s keynote discussion included current wireless medical products as well as future speculation that will leverage genomics with biosensor data to revolutionize personal health.
Topol’s keynote, titled “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” after his recently released book, focused on Topol’s belief that right now is medicine’s “kairos”, the Greek term for a supreme, opportune moment. “We’re moving from the population level to the individual level” in health, he said. The digital world and the longstanding medical world cocoon are intersecting, creating an “extraordinary” convergence.
The digitized man is a big change that exemplifies the future of medicine. Topol said he recently used AliveCor’s iPhoneECG to diagnosis a heart attack while on a plane trip. “Pretty darn impressive device,” he said of the credit-card sized sensor. “It’s just an idea of where we’re going [in the future]. For the right people, it can make a big difference.”
Topol spoke of the importance of the invention of the stethescope for medicine, then added that he hasn’t used a stethescope to listen to a patient’s heart in two years. “Why would you listen to a heart when you have an ultrasound in your pocket?” said Topol, then he did a live demonstration of GE’s Vscan ultrasound device. Topol previously spoke on the subject of handheld devices “cannibalizing” existing medtech at the Wireless Life-Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit in San Diego this summer, saying that ‘“stethoscope” is a term that is outdated because it implies the ability to “look” or scope into the patient’s chest. Topol said at the time he had little reason to only listen to a patient’s heartbeat again.
Topol also mentioned a company called DNA Electronics, who have created a handheld genome analysis system; a swab from the users’ cheek analyses the users’ genotype, and an app tells them the correct dose of Plavix or an alternative medicine to use.
Topol’s keynote also included a hypothetical “Apps of the Future” discussion which include genetically-tailored apps for heart attack risk, cancer detection, and transplant rejection.”This isn’t crazy,” he said. “It’s the future…old medicine is about to change.“
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Sebelius: Keep US the place for mHealth innovation
“We are talking about taking the biggest technology breakthrough of our time and using it to address our greatest national challenge,” Kathleen Sebelius U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during her keynote presentation at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC this morning. Sebelius envisioned a “remarkable future” where control over a patient’s own health was always within their control. She listed off a number of potential use cases for mobile health, including remote diagnosis of skin conditions using smartphone cameras; scheduling lab tests without a physician or medical office staff “lifting one finger”; working with your doctor to manage your own health every day instead of just once a year, she said.
Sebelius said that few industries have grown as quickly as mobile health has in the past two years since the first mHealth Summit in 2009, which Sebelius also keynoted. Sebelius noted the rapid growth of smartphones – more than half of all phones sold in the US this past year were smartphones – and that we are “increasingly” using our phones to track and manage our health.
Recent survey data published by Pew might throw a little cold water on that last statement: Pew found statistically insignificant growth for health app adoption among those surveyed for its 2010 and 2011 reports.
Sebelius also noted that there are “nearly 12,000 apps related to health” currently available in app store, and that’s a number “that is probably going up as I speak this morning,” she said. (This is true – dozens of health-related apps launch each week.)
Mobile technology has improved the consumer experience for almost every part of our lives, Sebelius noted, but healthcare has been until recently a notable exception. Sebelius said that healthcare has “stubbornly held on” to its old ways while other service industries like banking have embraced mobile. Keep reading>>
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Mechael: Leverage existing tech in developing world
The mHealth Alliance, a project of the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, is probably the most global of all the groups out there promoting mobile health. And the mHealth Summit, which the mHealth Alliance and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health are staging this week, likely is the most international of mobile health events held in the U.S.
Knowing that, it makes perfect sense that the alliance turned to Patricia Mechael to be its new executive director after founding Executive Director David Aylward left in May. Mechael, who started the job just a few weeks ago, has a strong background in international mobile health.
According to the organization, her doctoral studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine included research on how mobile phones factored into public health in Egypt. Mechael later was director of strategic application of mobile technology for public health and development at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. (She still holds the faculty appointment at Columbia.)
In 2008, Mechael was an invited participant in the mobile health segment of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Making the Health Connection conferences in Bellagio, Italy. The mHealth Alliance grew out of those conferences.
“Since Bellagio, it’s been incredible to see how much activity has happened, how much interest has emerged, and so even with respect to the summit, it’s quite visible,” Mechael said in an interview with MobiHealthNews. The first summit in 2009 drew less than 500 people. Last year, a little more than 2,000 came out—in part because one of the keynote speakers was Bill Gates. As of Monday morning, more than 3,200 people had registered for the third-annual mHealth Summit in National Harbor, Md., and Gates is nowhere to be found.
“There is this sort of collective interest in looking at mobile technologies as a tool, especially in developing countries, where oftentimes the mobile phone is the only information or communication technology that is reaching people in their communities,” Mechael continued.
As the new executive director, Mechael is using the occasion to spell out a clear vision and strategy for the mHealth Alliance. “Our major goal is to function as an alliance, and link together a collective movement toward the more effective leveraging of mobile technologies to support public health and health system strengthening in developing countries. Our major focus is really looking at low- and middle-income countries and global health,” she said. Keep reading>>
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HIMSS: Most hospitals still developing mobile policies
How ubiquitous is mobility in healthcare? In a new survey from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), just five of the 164 mostly hospital-based respondents said that no group of professionals in their organizations used mobile devices to access information necessary for their everyday activities.
Read the full article–>
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Childhood obesity study uses wearable sensors
As obesity increasingly becomes a worldwide epidemic, especially within children and adolescent populations, solutions to the problem are poised to become a major focus within mHealth. A handful of approaches were discussed during a panel, “Obesity, Diet, and Physical Activity,” at the 2011 mHealth Summit held in Washington, D.C. this week, including a noteworthy study by a Canadian research team.
Read the full article–>
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Complimentary eBook
Inside Healthcare IT Today
As federal and state mandates swirl about them, healthcare organizations continue pushing their way forward on a variety of key technology initiatives. Many are well on their way to full use of electronic health records, enabling complete mobility for their medical staffs, and building barriers around personally identifiable health information. But, many healthcare IT executives admit, much work is yet to be done in using IT to improve patient care and cut costs. Click here to download your free copy of this eBook.
Webinars
What Makes A Health App Effective?
What makes a health app effective? With more than 10,000 consumer health apps available for smartphone users, experienced app developers are just beginning to find answers to that question.
Join MobiHealthNews and two other healthcare industry thought leaders for a complimentary webinar focused on the world of health and medical apps. MobiHealthNews Editor Brian Dolan will present exclusive findings from our recent apps reports, which include an analysis of health and fitness apps published during the past three years. The webinar will also include a presentation from a leading health application developer who believes that health apps must be tethered to the healthcare system to be effective. Click here to view this complimentary webinar on demand.
Mobile Health Midyear Update
Whether 2011 represents the first or second year of Mobile Health development, most onlookers would likely agree that it has been an exciting one so far. The first half of the year included landmark deals, savvy investments, clearer regulatory directions, important product launches and more. If you haven’t had time to keep up (or might benefit from a recap), MobiHealthNews has you covered.Click here to view this webinar on demand.
State of the Industry Quarterly Reports:
2011:
> Q3 2011 (more info)
> Q2 2011 (more info)
> Q1 2011 (more info)
2010:
> Q4/Year-end 2010 (more info)
> Q3 2010 (more info)
> Q2 2010 (more info)
> Q1 2010 (more info)
Apps Reports:
Professional Medical Apps for Apple’s iPhone
Published: 10/2011
(more info)
Consumer Health Apps for Apple’s iPhone
Published: 9/2011
(more info)
The Fastest Growing and Most Successful Health & Medical Apps
Published: 9/2010
(more info)
The World of Health and Medical Apps
Published: 2/2010
(more info)
Tablet Reports:
The Coming Medical Tablet War: iPad, Android, BlackBerry, HP and others vie to dominate in healthcare
Published: 3/2011
(more info)
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