Mobile health startups mash-up sleep, weight, exercise data

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 23, 2010        

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HealthTriadDigifit, Withings and Zeo announced a “health triad” partnership this week that brings users an online dashboard that includes data from personal wellness devices like Withings’ connected scale, Zeo’s sleep monitoring device and Digifit Connect accessory wireless transceiver, which communicates with more than 80 different fitness sensors. Users of Digifit’s new iPhone app will also be able to review high level data from Withings and Zeo, too.

“Because it is widely known that proper diet and exercise are the mainstays for a healthy lifestyle, weight monitoring and tracking caloric burn with a heart rate monitor are popular health management tools,” the companies stated in a press release. “Only recently has it become convenient to measure and monitor your sleep quality and quantity, so the third piece of the health monitoring puzzle is rapidly gaining in popularity. By including sleep data, fitness enthusiasts now have a way to accurately measure recovery (Deep Sleep & REM sleep) which is key to optimizing physical training.”

The Digifit transceiver communicates with more than 80 ANT+ fitness sensors, like heart rate monitors and foot pod stride sensors developed by fitness companies like Garmin and Adidas.

“Withings and Zeo are leading edge pioneers in the industry and we are thrilled to partner with them. With the latest upgrade, our Digifit app completes the health triad puzzle by ‘automagically’ tracking the three most important influences on one’s health: exercise, weight and sleep. We do indeed have it All Together Now,” said Michael Williams, Digifit’s Founder.

If partnerships like this prove to be successful at driving users to various connected health and wellness devices, services and apps, consumer health companies will continue to buddy up and form their own micro-ecosystems. Fitness applications and connected devices have long served as examples as front lines of mHealth adoption. Makes you wonder if untethered PHR platform like Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault would have much to add if services like these band together on their own and form PHRs based on sticky wellness services.

For more on the new health triad: Read the release here
Additional thoughts over at Mashable

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Seven reasons HCPs will drive apps sales in 2015

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 23, 2010        

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If you want a mobile health app today, you likely need to head over to an app store that caters to your device or its operating system. According to mHealth developers who responded to a recent Research2Guidance survey, in 2015 sales of mobile health apps will be largely driven by recommendations from healthcare providers. Here are seven reasons R2G believes its survey respondents are right on:

1. Growing awareness: The growing awareness of mHealth in the medical community, as well as the growing proportion of patients using smartphones, will encourage healthcare professionals to exploit the possibilities rendered by smartphone technology and incorporate applications into their patient management plans.

2. Incentives: Specialized distribution providers will develop business models that will allow doctors to recommend applications and profit from downloads. They could, for example, receive a share of revenues from downloads or subscription fees from specialized mHealth app stores.

3. Sponsored apps: Applications that improve the efficacy of a particular treatment would be popular with pharmaceutical/device manufacturers, as doctors would be more likely to prescribe their products. Pharma/device companies would sponsor application development and encourage doctors to prescribe their products in conjunction with applications, which doctors would do because the application would improve patient outcomes, thereby giving the company’s product a competitive edge.

4. Patient demand: An increasing number of “tech-savvy” patients, understanding the benefits of mHealth applications, will expect treatment or convenient communication with healthcare professionals to be facilitated by applications. Keep reading>>

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Video Report: What is mHealth?

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 23, 2010        

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What Is mHealthWhat is mobile health? It’s been a topic of much discussion. My favorite response to this question came from mHealth analyst Jody Ranck who told me in a recent interview that: “In order to have an eye on where things might go and in order to have some ability to anticipate or analyze the unexpected, resisting a precise definition for mHealth, in my mind, is a good thing.”

As Ranck also rightly noted at the time, there is pressure from many groups for a precise definition of mobile health.

As part of our coverage at the mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. earlier this month, we polled close to two dozen attendees about their personal definitions for mobile health, mHealth or wireless health. What was core to the definition for them? Thanks to a lot of help from videographer Ethan Goldwater, MobiHealthNews is proud to present this video report: What is mHealth? Keep reading>>

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Interview: UnitedHealth Group on mobile health

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 23, 2010        

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Dr Migliori UnitedHealth GroupMobiHealthNews recently interviewed Dr. Richard Migliori, executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group, about the payor’s mobile health strategy, activities, apps and services. Migliori said that mobile health can help improve access to care and help the increasingly overburdened physician base better meet the needs of patients. Migliori explained the role of mobile apps backed by employer incentives in bringing about the payer’s vision for mobile health. Interestingly, United, itself, is among those employers that are using mobile health apps to help employees achieve wellness benchmarks.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Dr. Migliori:

What is UnitedHealth Group’s mobile health strategy?

For us, our mobile health strategy is one in which we try to make the healthcare system work better for more people. Currently, the ability for people to access more sophisticated tools that we and others in our industry have built has been constrained to just a few different routes. One of which is nurses calling patients to share insights about healthcare analytics. Another is mailings to peoples’ homes, and those frequently get ignored. Still another route is through [Internet] portals that tend to have varying levels of adoption. What we look at mobile health as is an opportunity, not as an end in itself, but as a means by which people can take advantage of the informational assets that we can bring to help them make better health decisions.

Also, we are starting to recognize that there is an opportunity to link better with the physicians that are serving our clients (their patients) by providing them with better access to our data. Day to day decisions made by both patients and physicians are the greatest determinants of effectiveness of healthcare. We have spent the last few decades building decision support capabilities by analyzing claim data and other data streams, including pharmacy data, laboratory data, health risk assessment data,  biometric data, and the like. We provide people a reflection back on the data that has been submitted on their behalf so that they can recognize the challenges that are confronting them on a personal level. We can then provide them with some — if not advice — at least some recognized opportunities that they should consider.

As I said, we have been providing people with those insights through various routes, but what we have found is that when we use mobility — telecommunications and other forms of electronics — we are able to reach more people. So, what we are focusing on is using this mobile health technology to help people make better decisions.

So far, what kind of insights or information has United provided through mobile platforms? Keep reading>>

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By 2014, $1.7B market for mobile apps in healthcare enterprise

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 22, 2010        

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ChilmarkPhysician

Chilmark Research: US physician adoption of smartphones and apps

The market opportunity for mobile apps in the healthcare enterprise is currently $100 million, according to a recent report from Chilmark Research. Because of the rapid evolution of mobile devices, physician demand, and the healthcare enterprise’s need to improve quality and efficiencies, the market will climb to $1.7 billion in three years time, Chilmark Research predicts.

“Currently, 63% of physicians are using an mHealth App in the enterprise,” says Cora Sharma, lead analyst at Chilmark Research. “However, the majority of these are clinical reference Apps with no tie-in to an enterprise’s healthcare information systems (HIS). Physician adoption of mobile devices, including extremely rapid adoption of touchscreen tablets such as Apple’s iPad, will lead to equally rapid adoption and deployment of mHealth App solutions by these enterprises – not just to help them comply with meaningful use or to satisfy physician demands, but also in an effort to improve operational efficiencies and quality of care delivered.”

Chilmark believes that tablets’ larger screen size will move mHealth apps away from the restricted smartphone platform, which it believes has a “restricted” feature sets. Tablets will enable clinicians to make use of “mHealth Apps with improved bidirectional data flow through a touch interface,” the research firm stated in its release.

“One area that will reach saturation in the very near future is medical content,” Chilmark Principal John Moore writes on his firm’s blog. “Companies such as Epocrates, Medscape and Skyscape have been providing this capability for a number of years to physicians and we peg current adoption and use north of 60 percent. By the end of 2013, this market will reach saturation. This may partially explain Epocrates’ acquisition move yesterday, picking up Modality for $13.8M. Modality will provide Epocrates with critical relationships to many health content publishers and further solidify and strengthen its position in this market. But of Modality’s some 140 iOS-based Apps, only half are heath and life sciences related. Might Modality provide Epocrates the opportunity to expand into new markets now that the health content market is reaching saturation?”

The new Chilmark Research report is the result of roughly three months of dedicated research by the firm’s lead analyst Cora Sharma who interviewed numerous leading adopters of mHealth Apps (Beth Israel Deaconess, Children’s Hospital Boston, UPMC and others) as well as both traditional HIT vendors, best-of-breed mHealth vendors and consultants.

The core focus of Chilmark’s latest report is on enterprise mHealth Apps that link into a healthcare enterprise’s HIS including EHR, CPOE, eRx, CDS and Charge Capture. Chilmark predicts that these types of apps will be “competitive differentiators” for healthcare enterprises who seek to not only meet meaningful use requirements and structure themselves for payment reform, but also to improve internal workflow for higher efficiency.

For more, read Chilmark Research’s press release
Also, check out the report’s information page in Chimark’s Research Store

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Round-up: Reactions to the mHealth Summit

By: Brian Dolan | Nov 18, 2010        

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Brian Dolan, Editor, MobiHealthNewsThe mHealth Summit 2010, which took place in Washington DC last week, found coverage in a number of trade and business publications and blogs. Here’s a round-up of some of the more interesting commentary to come out of the event where more than 2,400 attendees convened:

Wireless health care: M-powered – The Economist: “No doubt a dose of scepticism is warranted about m-health. But given the growing evidence of its usefulness and the new business models from emerging markets, there is reason for hope too. As Mr Gates pointed out this week, ‘Middle-income countries are where most innovation in health care is going to come from.’” The Economist

Mobile phones become tools of health promotion – The Washington Post: “But the optimism was tempered by the acknowledgment that there are hurdles to be overcome. The wide variety of mobile devices, operating systems and network speeds creates complexity. The business models have yet to fully take shape as to who pays for services and who profits. And with a field as regulated as health and human services, a need to establish standards still exists.” WashPo

Cell Phone Science – Bill Gates – The Gates Notes: “Peter Lillehoj and Chih-Ming Ho of the University of California, Los Angeles, received a grant to develop a disposable malaria biosensor based on a SIM card platform. The SIM card-biosensor will allow malaria detection to be performed using a cell-phone, which will make diagnostic testing more widely available in rural and remote areas. Terry Ferrari of World Vision will be field testing the use of two cell phone modules that will help community health workers in Mozambique caring for pregnant women and newborns to assess, to take action, and to refer cases with complications and emergencies. Another mobile-phone based tool being developed by Marc Mitchell of D-Tree International uses clinical algorithms to quickly identify women at risk during labor and delivery and assist with emergency transfer to a hospital. If these tools are successful, they could significantly reduce maternal and infant mortality rates.” The Gates Notes Keep reading>>

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