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Wireless healthcare is, ultimately, a consumer play. That was one key message built-in to both West Wireless Health Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol’s presentation and CardioNet’s Director of Business Development Aaron Goldmuntz’s presentation this week at the Qualcomm Smart Services Leadership Summit.

There are currently 1.2 million people who use mobile fitness products to track their vital signs while working out, Topol noted. It starts with fitness, but use cases for health and medical wireless health services are set to become increasingly popular. A recent ABI report found that 90 percent of the current wearable wireless sensor market is dominated by the fitness industry. By 2014, the market will swell to 400 million units, thanks in large part to growing use of sensors for healthcare and medical uses.

CardioNet may be one company that helps lead that change.

While we have long considered CardioNet’s MCOT solution a clinician-facing diagnostic tool, Goldmuntz stressed throughout his presentation that the end user, the patient, is still one of its key customers. CardioNet’s system must be comfortable for the patient to wear and easy for them to use. In the end, of course, the system is also designed to help them get well, too.

Wireless remote monitoring of arrhythmia may not be quite like the empowering experience that many consumer-facing wireless health services promise to bring to market in the coming years, but CardioNet has its eye on wireless solutions that address everything from diabetes and sleep apnea to hypertension management. While the company may not expand into those areas for years to come, it certainly points to a growing consensus that the consumer side of wireless health looks to be a robust opportunity.

The overt stress at Qualcomm’s event on the consumer opportunity in wireless health was not lost on me, especially since last week I noted in this column that it seemed like funding dollars were only chasing clinician-facing wireless health start-ups right now. While last week’s conclusion stands as a snapshot of the wireless health industry today, the greater opportunity clearly remains in leveraging wireless health services to empower and enable patients to take better care of their own health.

If you disagree, be sure to check out our coverage of Cisco’s Dr. Danny Sands’ keynote from the World Health Congress’ Wireless Health event in Boston this past week. Sands illuminated the (many) challenges facing those looking to get doctors to add another “whiz bang” gadget to their already comically-crowded Batman utility belt.

So while the venture capitalist’s focus may be on clinical products with a good chance at attaining reimbursement and the majority of wireless sensors are being used for fitness applications and services instead of consumer-facing medical ones, the space between the “clinical” and the “fitness” opportunities for wireless health is still very much the sweet spot for this emerging industry.

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“It is really not all about the technology,” explained Dr. Daniel Sands, senior medical informatics director for Cisco Systems, during his keynote at the World Health Care Congress’s Wireless Health event this week. “My talk is entitled ‘It’s not about the technology, confessions of a healthcare technologist.’”

“So it’s a first,” Sands said. “Everything we do is a first. So, we are excited by the fact that we are implementing technology, that’s really exciting but you know what? So what. It’s OK, it’s cool, and it’s great. That’s as far as it goes. In fact, if we want to succeed at what it is that we are doing, we are going to have to do more than just be the first cool whiz bang thing. And that’s really what we would focus on. Ultimately, it’s this that we have got to think about — if we have a technology, something that we are trying to do. It shouldn’t be about the technology it should be about solving these problems. Thinking about all of the stakeholders in healthcare starting with the clinician and the patient in the center. Then, of course, the other people in the ecosystem: public health agencies, health authorities, hospital practices, life sciences and the payers. We need to think about how we are helping this whole ecosystem, not just how we are going to create widgets.”

While he didn’t use the word, Sands clearly believes there to be a lot of hype about wireless health. His keynote at the WiHealth event in Boston began with a rant against fetish-sizing technology for technology’s sake but ended with a series of thoughtful challenges that face every company looking to gain a foothold in the emerging wireless health industry. Continue >>

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CardioNet’s Director of Business Development Aaron Goldmuntz laid out his company’s growth strategy during a presentation this morning at Qualcomm’s Smart Services Leadership Summit here in San Diego. Immediate opportunities for growth, Goldmuntz said, included leveraging CardioNet’s platform to develop additional applications that relate to atrial fibrillation. Adjacent markets could include work in clinical trials, increased business with cardiac surgeons, applications addressing stroke prevention as well as leveraging the CardioNet platform for use internationally. (Surprised to hear CardioNet bring up its interest in clinical trials despite its recently cancelled acquisition of Biotel, which looked to help position the company to launch its clinical trial business.)

Beyond those adjacent markets, Goldmuntz pointed to other conditions that CardioNet sees as potential opportunities for wireless diagnostic and monitoring tools: sleep apnea, hypertension, heart failure, diabetes and neurology. While Cardionet recently announced its SomNet offering, Goldmuntz noted that SomNet only determines indications for sleep apnea and is not a diagnostic tool. A diagnostic tool might be a future product for CardioNet, however. Continue >>

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The way that we listen to music these days is completely different from the way it used to be; the way we communicate via electronic messaging is also very different; so is the way we read books thanks to devices like Amazon’s Kindle, explained The West Wireless Health Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol at the Qualcomm Smart Services Summit in San Diego earlier this week.

“Wouldn’t it be natural — knowing that in a very short period of time our world has changed — that we could apply these devices to healthcare,” Topol continued. “Reading, listening to music and communicating… healthcare can change in the same way.”

Topol noted that thanks to “extremely ingenius developments in wireless sensors” coupled with breakthroughs in genomics, we are now able to “profile the individual in an exquisite and elegant way.”

Topol gave three key examples for ways that genomic profiling can be paired with wireless sensor technologies to bring about these elegant preventive medicine services. Continue >>

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Verizon Wireless and Qualcomm announced a joint venture to provide advanced machine-to-machine (M2M) services, including wireless healthcare applications, devices and services. The as yet unnamed joint venture will be led by Steve Pazol, Qualcomm’s VP of Global Smart Services.

M2M is broadly defined as the market for devices that connect through wireless markets to each other, wireless sensors connecting to in-home wireless hubs, for example, as opposed to connecting mobile phones to the network. “The Internet of Things” is another common way to describe the consumer side of M2M: household appliances that wirelessly connect to the Internet are top of mind examples.

“M2M is a rapidly growing market projected by some analysts to reach more than 85 million connections globally by 2012,” Pazol said in the company press release. “The next five years will be a significant period of innovation in M2M. Qualcomm and Verizon expect to create a company focused in evolving niche aftermarket strategies to embedded product standardization strategies, driving down costs, increasing performance expectations and enabling impactful new business models.”

This week at Qualcomm’s Smart Services Summit in San Diego, Verizon Wireless VP Open Development Anthony Lewis explained that the joint venture will include everything “from the very, very simple devices that are just doing data bursts… to more complex devices such as medical [devices], that need huge data [throughput.]” The joint venture, which is equally co-owned by both Verizon Wireless and Quaclomm, will leverage Qualcomm’s M2M technologies and Verizon Wireless’ open network certification program as well as the carrier’s sales team.

By leveraging Verizon Wireless sales team, Lewis promised that the JV would push the M2M industry to progress quicker. “This is no longer a niche,” Lewis said. “Connections are the future… and wireless needs to get beyond any individual handset, no matter how smart.” Continue >>

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The Wireless Health or WiHealth event kicked off in Boston this Monday with a keynote presentation by Janet Marchibroda, IBM’s newly appointed Chief Healthcare Officer, and former founding CEO of the eHealth Initiative (eHI). Minutes into her keynote Marchibroda made a bold and seemingly odd statement for a keynoter at an event that is focused is wireless health:

“I’m not going to spend time on wireless health or telehealth but more so on the policy environment,” Marchibroda explained.

What followed was a lengthy discussion of ARRA, meaningful use and the federal government’s push for electronic health records. Marchibroda noted many of the various EHR-related stats that have been batted around for months including: Only about 4 percent of healthcare facilities have an electronic health system and only about 13 percent have a basic functional system. About 1.5 percent of U.S. hospitals, however, have a “comprehensive” electronic health records system.

Finally, more than three quarters of the way through her presentation, Marchibroda asked the audience: How can we make sure — how can we leverage some of these incentives to get funding for what we do in telehealth? How can it fit in with meaningful use? We do run that risk that healthcare providers might meet the requirements but then stop right there.

“Meaningful use will drive dollars in this industry for the next five to ten years,” Marchibroda concluded.

Better Health’s Vince Kuraitis, who was in the audience, commented moments later that the statement was no less than “profound.” Continue >>

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Digital sales and health marketing company Physicians Interactive (PI) acquired mobile medical content publisher Skyscape late last week for an undisclosed sum. PI stated in the press release announcing the acquisition that the deal gives its partners access to Skyscape’s more than 1 million users. Skyscape’s mobile apps and PDA programs for health practitioners compete with similar offerings from Epocrates, Thomson Reuters and many more.

Physicians Interactive is a digital marketing firm that targets doctors and other health workers via a number of services through various platforms and in a statement it said the purchase of Skyscape would double the size of its network of physicians. Private equity fund Perseus bought Physicians Interactive last year. More

A report over at Mass High Tech explains that PI plans to build on Skyscape’s mobile platform with other offerings for pharmaceutical, biotech and other life science companies, both on mobile devices and through the Internet. Following the deal, Skyscape has become a wholly owned subsidiary of PI, which will re-locate its corporate offices to Skyscape’s offices in Marlborough, MA. More

For more on Physicians Interactive’s acquisition of Skyscape, read the company press release here.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases topped $147 billion in 2008, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.

During the past decade that cost of treating obesity effectively doubled: The medical costs associated with obesity were pegged at $74 billion in 1998. The number of obese people in the U.S. rose 37 percent between 1998 and 2006. In 2006 obesity costs accounted for about 9.1 percent of all medical costs. Obese people also spent about 42 percent more than people of normal weight on medical costs in 2006, which makes for a difference of $1,429. Most of those costs were from prescription drugs.

The CDC said that the average American is about 23 pounds overweight and consumers about 250 more calories a day than the average American did two or three decades ago.

The CDC’s budget for nutrition, physical activity and obesity programs is only about $43 million for this year.

At Qualcomm’s Smart Services Leadership Summit in San Diego this week, the West Wireless Health Institute’s Dr. Eric Topol noted that we now have uncovered the the genetic contribution to non-syndromic human obesity. Continue >>

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As we have noted in the past, for those seeking to bring clinically-focused wireless health services to market, there are a number of trail blazers in the industry that can provide some clues for go-to-market strategies. We have discussed the FDA and FCC regulatory frameworks facing wireless health as well as the importance of securing reimbursement from (CMS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Of course, to influence the federal government most industries turn to seasoned lobbyists. A quick look at the lobbying activity paid for by two pioneers of wireless health — CardioNet and LifeWatch — demonstrates that this industry is no different. Here’s how lobbying spend breaks down in the emerging remote cardiac monitoring industry:

Between 2006 and the first half of 2009, CardioNet spent $280,000 on lobbying the various branches of government, including, CMS, Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac), House of Representatives, Senate, HHS, Agency for Healthcare Policy & Research, Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office (GAO), Executive Office of the President, Office of Management & Budget. CardioNet lobbied on issues including “remote cardiac services” and “Remote Monitoring Access Act of 2007.”

LifeWatch began paying lobbyist in the second quarter of 2008, but between then and now it has already spent some $150,000 on lobbying various government branches and organizations, including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Veterans Affairs, House of Representatives and the Senate. LifeWatch’s key lobbying topic was described as: “Introduce LifeWatch’s capabilities and discuss their portfolio of ambulatory health monitoring, especially cardiac monitoring.” Here’s a look at LifeWatch’s lobbyist spending to date: Continue >>

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According to a recent report from ABI Research, wearable wireless sensors are set to grow to more than 400 million devices by 2014. The research firm believes demand will come from professional healthcare, home healthcare and sports and fitness markets, but each market will develop at different speeds and support different applications.

ABI estimates that the sports and fitness market represents more than 90 percent of the wireless sensor market today.

“These are very early days for wearable wireless sensors in the healthcare market, but a number of factors are coming together to support strong growth over the next five years,” ABI Research principle analyst Jonathan Collins said in a statement. “Technology and product development, wireless protocol standardization, and the potential already seen in sports and fitness monitoring will help drive investment in the healthcare market.”

ABI noted that Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, 802.15.4 and proprietary offerings are the typical technologies wireless sensor developers consider when designing their systems, but the industry is keen on standardizing products wherever possible. As we have noted in the past, Bluetooth Low Energy and ZigBee are the two standards that Continua Health Alliance picked for its second generation guidelines.

For more on the ABI Research study, check out the company’s press release.

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