mobihealthnews

This past week I served as co-chair of the second annual Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit in London. Fresh off a red-eye flight into London Tuesday morning, I joined Qualcomm’s Vice President of Healthcare Don Jones on-stage to conduct a one-on-one interview for the more than 100 attendees present. Jones outlined a number of strategies for mobile health startups, batted away a number of oft-cited challenges for the mobile health industry and offered an insider’s perspective into how the key stakeholders of wireless health view the opportunities today.

BD: This morning’s discussion is focused on whether 2010 is “The year of mobile health”.  Don, you and I were talking earlier: “Mobile health” is not a term that Qualcomm uses. Why is that?

DJ: Well, we use the term “wireless health” for a couple of reasons. One, is that we sell wireless technologies. So, it’s rather direct from that perspective. But the other thing I like to say is that “not all mobile health is wireless” and “not all wireless health is mobile”. A lot of the opportunities that we see using cellular technology actually don’t require that the end-user device actually be mobile itself. So, if you think about all the different kinds of radio technologies that are involved in our industry—ultra low power radios, WiFi, personal body area network technologies, and then moving up through to the wireless wide area radio technologies—there’s just a lot of different technologies in that arena and when you look at the use cases there may or may not be a mobility issue. The mobility issue may be, for example, “How do we ship a product into somebody’s home?” That may be the mobile part. And once it’s in the home it may no longer be mobile.

BDD: The semantic issue is one we run into all the time. It can be confusing. I think your explanation is helpful.

Don, you joined Qualcomm at the end of 2002 and shortly thereafter was when Qualcomm inked a deal with CardioNet, which is still, to my knowledge, the only true pure-play wireless health public company out there today. That deal was back in 2003. Then, in 2005 you helped co-found the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance. That was about five years ago. Early last year, about a year and a half ago, you were integral to the founding of the West Wireless Health Institute in San Diego, in the US. Those are each big milestones from the past seven years. Getting back to this discussion as to whether 2010 is the year of wireless health, I’m curious: What’s really changed in the last 1.5 years, five years, seven years — take your pick of the time frame. Any clear trend?

DJ: What was absolutely key in the last year and a half was that the mobile operator community began to raise their hands and ask: How do we play? Frankly, that wasn’t happening much earlier than that. There certainly were pilot examples involving mobile operators around the world, but operators weren’t saying: “We can make a difference in this space.” “We can make a business in this space.” It’s clear now that operators (as we saw in an earlier presentation by Thierry Zylberbery from Orange) are going to form part of a new distribution channel for some of the important developments in the healthcare. It’s an important distribution channel and one that brings economies of scale and devices. Continue >>

By Frank Avignone

In the last 18 months there has been a deafening noise around the use of mobile technology in addressing some of the challenges facing health care today in this country. Although there are many definitions of what the “killer app” for mHealth is dependent on the vendor you ask. One common impression that is pervasive is that mobile technology solutions will somehow play a key role in re-shaping health care in this country and continue worldwide.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of mobile solutions for health care have a common thread in that the lion’s share are aimed at disease and disease management of some type. From the recent FDA approval of a one specific vendor’s diabetes solution to the myriad of mobile devices to record biometric measurements of all types there are more mobile technology and remote monitoring applications for health care than all other healthcare applications combined with an estimated 2,000 today and growing (Naish, 2010). From “I Tweet Your Weight” to “Fertility Monitor”, “Sleep Aid”, “Acne App”, to finally “Baby’s Coming” if you have a situation with your health some innovative engineer has created an “App For That” (Naish, 2010).

Here in the United States with the appearance of grant money for the Regional Extension Centers, Beacon Projects, Health Information Exchanges and Meaningful Use projects has provided mobile application providers for health care yet another venue to create value propositions that further confuse the vision for these products and services. No matter how cool the mobile app for health care may seem the real challenge for mobile technology solution providers is finding a clear definition of what it is they provide, to whom they sell, what the business model is, and most importantly why will the consumer utilize their products and services. Continue >>

During the past week we noticed a number of new mobile health related videos posted to YouTube. Here’s a quick round-up of seven videos we found interesting and relevant to the mobile health industry. They range from quick clips from national television to interviews conducted on-site at various industry events.

A Fox affiliate recently put together a quick segment on fitness applications for smartphones. Two apps were featured:

Continue >>

The World Economic Forum convened an mHealth Summit in San Diego this week led by Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs who is also the Chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Mobile Communications. Following the discussion yesterday, the group put together a series of videos, including a video of the day’s opening remarks and a series of quick interviews with some of the session’s attendees and speakers.

This first video is of the opening remarks that kicked off the World Economic Forum’s mHealth Summit and include commentary from WEF COO Kevin Steinberg and Jacobs:

Below are nine interviews posted by the WEF on the mHealth Summit site: Continue >>

By Bradley Merrill Thompson

(Several friends commented on this draft, and I would like to thank them.)

Warning, this article contains explicit and sometimes graphic depictions of possible FDA regulation.

If you’ve been reading the prior articles in the series, you know I’ve been leading up to this last article in which I offer some predictions as to where FDA regulation will end up with regard to mHealth technology. Rather than just give you my predictions, however, I’m going to show you how I arrive at them. In this article, as the basis for my prediction, I use the political science equivalent of Newton’s second law of motion: the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to, and in a direction determined by, the net force acting on it. I also throw in a little portfolio theory, just to spice it up.

Borrowing from Newton’s law, I identify the vector forces that represent each of the primary social and political constituents affecting FDA regulation. As I identify them, I estimate both the magnitude and the direction of the force. Actually it’s easier to communicate this in a graph. Continue >>

The mobile health trend started to pick up steam halfway through last year: Since then a flurry of reports have hit the interwebs with insightful analysis and punchy interviews well worth reading.

At the close of 2009, MobiHealthNews published its own Wireless Health State of the Industry Report, which we offered up as a holiday gift to our readers. There are many other high quality reports currently available free to download, including one penned and researched by esteemed health economist Jane Sarasohn-Kahn called How Smartphones Are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers, which the California Health Care Foundation published over the weekend. It is a must read.

We have assembled five mobile health industry reports, including Sarasohn-Kahn’s as part of our early spring reading list. If you haven’t yet soaked in these five mHealth reports, you are handicapping your mHealth acumen. Here’s five freely downloadable reports you must read: Continue >>