Wireless Health: Year End Report 2009
 FDA may regulate smartphone apps. LifeComm closes. Best Buy stocks connected health devices. Apple invites LifeScan on-stage. The West Wireless Health Institute is founded. CardioNet’s reimbursement rate cut. Consumers want wireless health. Three-quarters of Americans are interested.
2009 was a big year for wireless health and in many ways it was this industry’s break out year. Activity in the sector quickly ramped up as the second half of 2009 saw nearly a 50 percent rise in the number of deals inked for wireless health joint ventures, acquisitions and pilots during the first half of 2009. Likewise, twice as many venture capital investments (10) were announced in the second half of 2009, than were announced in the first half (five) of the year. (We suspect a good number were just kept quiet.)
In keeping with out mission to chronicle the emerging wireless health industry, MobiHealthNews has spent these last few weeks combing through our more than 700 news posts, 2,000 reader comments and 45 weekly newsletters to bring you a snapshot of the wireless health industry as it looked at the end of these busy 12 months. We are happy to announce the MobiHealthNews Wireless Health: State of the Industry — Year End Report 2009. (Download Here (pdf))
As 2009 comes to a close, so too does MobiHealthNews’ first year of publishing. Please accept this report as our holiday gift to you. Feel free to re-gift it to colleagues, friends and family. For those scrappy wireless health startups reading, this may be an opportunity to approach that wealthy uncle or aunt you had hoped would come on as an Angel investor—N.B. this report contains nearly all of the wireless health market metrics publicly released this past year as well as a round-up of other startups that received funding in ‘09. The quarter-by-quarter deals charts also read like an industry timeline that chronicles much of the higher-level activity that took place throughout 2009.
If the quickening of activity in the sector at the end of the year is any indication, 2010 looks to be an even more active year for the industry. Will the industry’s overall revenue generation double from 2009’s $304 million figure as some analysts predict?
Stay tuned to MobiHealthNews’ daily coverage to find out. We look forward to serving you in the New Year — Happy Holidays!
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CardioNet hires financial advisor, mulls sale?
CardioNet, a wireless remote cardiac monitoring company, has hired Lazard Freres & Co. of New York to evaluate its options, CEO Randy Thurman told investors on a call this morning. Analysts believe the move means CardioNet may seriously consider a sale.
According to the Wall Street Journal, CardioNet previously had hinted it would consider a sale and Jefferies & Co. analyst Joshua Jennings told the WSJ that CardioNet’s move to hire Lazard shows that the previous talk wasn’t just hype.
CardioNet also told investors this morning that it plans to cut $15 million in operating costs in order to remain afloat — the company has already cut $8 million in expenses this year. Thurman said the company’s plans to cut costs include job reductions, operating efficiencies particularly in the area of collecting on accounts receivable, and reducing the use of outside consultants.
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| NHS: Wireless health, EHRs need standards
MobiHealthNews had the opportunity to interview George MacGinnis with the Assistive Technology Programme at the NHS Connecting for Health in the UK at the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit in London earlier this month. MacGinnis explained the differences between telecare and telehealth, how the UK enjoys a lead on the US and other countries when it comes to some telemedicine penetration rates, and how Continua’s work toward personal medical device interoperability is key. MacGinnis stressed that the UK learned from its EHR rollout that interoperability was what would really make these systems very useful. He seems determined not to lose the fight for interoperability among remote monitoring devices and systems.
(Scroll down to the end of the article for the video version of the interview with MacGinnis moderated by your very jet-lagged editor).
MobiHealthNews: Is the UK out in front of others, including the US, when it comes to smart homes, telecare and telehealth home health care technology adoption?
MacGinnis: The UK starts from a position where we have state provided social care. With that we had a history of using technology and social care to move people out of residential care homes and keep them in their own homes. There is a significant infrastructure there already. In terms of penetration rate: We have upwards of 1 million people who enjoy some form of remote monitoring technology and around 300,000 or more “smart homes” are already out there and wired.
That’s probably very different from what is classically talked about more often in places like the US for instance in terms of chronic disease management. [For chronic disease management] we are starting out along with everyone else — we are still in the stage of early pilots.
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Analyst: Our 30M caregivers need wireless tools
According to industry consulting firm Wireless Healthcare’s principal analyst Peter Kruger, there are more than 30 million people in the US that are caregivers for a family member, typically an older family member. Wireless Healthcare believes that providing this “hidden army” of healthcare workers with the right tools could help reduce the costs of healthcare expenditures.
Wireless Healthcare is a UK-based firm — it estimates that 20 percent of adults in the UK are looking after elderly parents and providing care worth £39 billion ($63 billion) per year.
The group believes that a range of health applications and care services could be brought together on the mobile phone to equip these caregivers, which Wireless Healthcare calls “Alpha Daughters” because they are typically the daughters of the elderly parents.
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IBM, Novartis, Vodafone launch SMS For Life
Earlier this month at the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit, Vodafone Group CEO Vittoro Colao announced that the carrier was working with pharmaceutical company Novartis on a program called SMS For Life in Tanzania. Vodafone, Novartis and their partner IBM announced the program officially today.
As Colao noted, the program covers some 135 villages (more than 1 million people) in Tanzania after going live just this past September. SMS For Life allows health workers to keep track of and send reports on supply and demand for medications, especially anti-malarial drugs. Colao said the system already has a 97 percent compliance rate with workers and it is a “simple application which has an incredible impact in terms of saving lives.”
“During the first few weeks of the pilot, the number of health facilities with stock-outs in one district alone, was reduced by over 75 percent. The early success of the SMS for Life pilot project has the Tanzanian authorities interested in implementing the solution across the rest of the country. Tanzania has around 5,000 clinics, hospitals and dispensaries, but at any one time, as many as half could potentially be out of stock of anti-malarial drugs,” the release stated.
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3M launches smartphone dictation app
3M launched a new physician dictation application for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices that allows physicians to use a single tool for phone, email and dictation, the company stated in a release. Since the device provides data access through WiFi or 3G , 3M’s software, called 3M Mobile Dictation, does not require the user to synch his dictation software with the server since it provides always-on connectivity. The software also enables physicians to view patient lists, search patient IDs and display the most current patient information on their phone’s screen.
3M Mobile Dictation captures and transmits the voice notes, encrypts them and securely transmits them to be transcribed and entered into the physician’s EMR or practice management system. The software works with transcription services including 3M ChartScript and 3M VoiceScript.
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The top selling iPhone medical app of 2009
Apple recently announced the top selling apps, songs, games and podcasts from 2009 in an iTunes feature it called iTunes Rewind 2009. Perhaps surprisingly, one medical iPhone app made the list of the top 30 selling iPhone applications in 2009: Proloquo2Go. The app, which costs $189.999, appears among apps that generated the most revenue in 2009, which seems to be how Apple created a list of the Top Selling apps for the year.
Here’s how the app describes itself: “Proloquo2Go is a new product from AssistiveWare that provides a full-featured communication solution for people who have difficulty speaking. It brings natural sounding text-to-speech voices, up-to-date symbols, powerful automatic conjugations, a default vocabulary of over 7000 items, full expandability and extreme ease of use to the iPhone and iPod touch.”
Other apps in the list include Major League Baseball, CNN, ESPN, AOL AIM, Family Guy and more. Proloquo2Go must have sold a number of apps to make the list — even at number 23 of 30, it outsold ESPN, Family Guy and ESPN among tens of thousands of others. No small feat.
So how did a relatively obscure app rise above the rest? Perhaps one article from a major newspaper this fall helped out: Proloquo2Go was the focus of a New York Times feature, entitled Insurers Shun Multitasking Speech Devices, this past September:
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French wireless carrier Orange courts mHealth
At Informa’s Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit in London last week, Thierry Zylberberg, General Manager Health Business at France Telecom gave an important lesson to wireless carriers and retailers as to how they can profit from mHealth today, as he revealed details of the Mondial “Care & Assistance” option being offered on contract and prepaid tariffs in France. France Telecom’s wireless brand is called Orange.
He also revealed details of Diabeo (a rival to the Vodafone t+ Medical Diabetes Program – albeit with one of the worst mHealth user interfaces I’ve seen – see picture below) a service that is reliant on a “dedicated handset supporting bespoke software” which appears to be a rather rare HTC model (although according to the Diabeo website it runs on Windows Mobile – so the supported handset range is probably a lot wider than Zylberberg is revealing).
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Parents want mobile-based diabetes devices
Close to 70 percent of parents with children who have Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes had a “very positive” review of a mobile phone glucometer prototype that Partners Healthcare’s Center for Connected Health developed. More than 50 percent of the parents expressed interest in signing up for a service that includes such a device, according to result from an online survey. Nearly 30 percent of parents said they would “definitely sign up” for the prototype mobile phone glucometer service, while an additional 27.7 percent said that they would “probably sign up.”
Additionally nearly 85 percent of parents wanted shorter wait times to see their physicians and close to 80 percent wanted easier phone access to their physicians, while 78 percent would like to be able to contact their physician via email to discuss their child’s diabetes.
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Apple investigates wireless health sensors
While Apple supports the Nike+ activity monitor and has demonstrated a connected blood glucometer made by Lifescan at its iPhone 3G unveiling, its movement toward championing peripheral health devices for the iPhone has been decidedly limited to date. However, a recent patent application points to the a lot of activity on the connected health front inside the company’s research and development teams: An Apple patent describes a couple of methods for using a wireless earbud to track a user’s blood oxygen level, body temperature, heat flux and heart rate. The patent application notes that the earbud could use infrared photodetectors to monitor the user’s biometrics. Here’s a passage from the patent app:
“From infrared radiation in the user’s ear, sensors… can detect minute temperature variations due to the user’s heart beats. Heart rate can be calculated based on time between beats and the user’s temperature can be set as the ‘DC Component’ (or average or median value) of the detected temperature distribution. Other sensors can also be used for tracking the same physiological metrics or different physiological metrics.”
For blood oxygen levels, the system would require a light source and a photodetector to “detect the portion of such light that passes through the user’s earlobe, the remaining light having been absorbed within the user’s earlobe. From the relative absorption of these two wavelengths of light, the user’s blood oxygen content can be calculated.”
For more on the Apple patents, read this article from Apple Insider, which spotted the patents a few weeks ago.
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Shorts: Livestrong; UnitedHealthcare app
Livestrong offers diabetes tracker: Lance Armstrong and his team at LiveStrong are taking on diabetes: This week, Armstrong introduced a new feature called MyPlate D on Livestrong.com. MyPlate D builds on the current food and exercise tracking tools available to users on Livestrong’s site. MyPlate D helps Type 2 diabetics break food down to its nutritional components, beyond calories: carbohydrates, fats, proteins and sodium. It also has a spot for people to track insulin use and monitor glucose. Livestrong’s Calorie Tracker app for BlackBerry and iPhone synch with the MyPlate D program. More
UnitedHealthcare’s iPhone app: UnitedHealthcare has created an iPhone app called DocGPS that includes listings for its network of doctors, clinics, hospitals and other health care services. More
Information overload: According to a new report from the University of California in San Diego, U.S. households consumed about 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008. One zettabyte is 1,000,000,000 trillion bytes. The total number of bytes consumed last year were the equivalent to the information in thick paper back novels stacked sevent feet high across the entire Unite Stateds. More
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Shorts: Start-up raises $535K; Wireless brain
Wireless bed sensor startup raises $535K: During the past year Roanoke, Virginia-based startup Wireless Medcare has raised $535,000 in capital to develop Vivatrak, a wireless sensor that attaches to a patient’s bed. Vivatrak monitors patient movement to prevent bed sores or to prevent falls if a patient attempt to get up without assistance. The startup’s founders say the need to raise $1.5 million to bring the sensor to market, and plan on submitting it to the FDA for clearance early next year. More
Former Lifecomm CEO accepts pharma board gig: Former Lifecomm CEO Louis Silverman accepted a board position at public pharmaceuticals company Questcor. Silverman is also now CEO of privately-held, Cerritos, CA-based Marina Medical Billing Service, which provides revenue cycle management services to emergency room physicians nationwide. More
First wireless brain-computer interface: Wired reports on a system that turns brain waves into FM radio signals and decodes them as sound — the publication has dubbed it “the first totally wireless brain-computer interface.” More
DOD focusing on mHealth: Federal Telemedicine News has a great feature on the Department of Defense’s (DOD) increasing focus on wireless health. More
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