In every newsletter edition of MobiHealthNews we include a "Quote of the Week" -- we actually do this twice a week since the MobiHealthNews letter goes out on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. That means in order for it to become the new quote of the week, our Thursday quote needs to be even better than our Tuesday one. We also include some of these favorite quotes in our quarterly reports. This week as we published our Q3 State of the Mobile Health Industry 2013 report, we decided to take a minute to review some of the most memorable quotes from this year so far.
Within these quotes the year in digital health takes shape -- exits and acquisitions, the rise of the wearable health device, a growing body of mobile health efficacy data, pop culture references to mobile health, and much, much more. Which are your favorite quotes from 2013? Here are 31 of ours in the list below:
"Just as the iPad has become the chosen form factor for clinicians today. I can definitely see a day when computing devices are more integrated into the clothing or body of the clinician."
- Dr. John Halamka, CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
"In fashion circles, the FuelBand reigns supreme. It all began when Serena Williams strode onto Centre Court last year at Wimbledon sporting one next to her magenta sweatband. Was this the new tennis bracelet? Since then, they’ve started popping up on chic wrists all over town."
- Chloe Malle, Social Editor, Vogue Magazine
"We want to connect healthcare professional experiences on mobile with patient experiences on mobile and the first step is to allow doctors to prescribe educational materials to their patients from app to app."
- Todd Zander, VP of Mobile and Emerging Media, WebMD
"Well, it takes advantage of all these great sensors and it continuously measures the data coming from them without even having to wake up the [the phone's main processor]. It measures the accelerometer, the gyroscope, and the compass. With new software and applications, you are going to get a whole new level of health and fitness solutions never before possible on a mobile phone."
- Phil Schiller, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Apple
"Don’t come to us telling us you can upload [data] into our electronic medical record. We don’t necessarily want it there... Our physicians don’t want it all there. They really don’t need to know how much exercise each of their patients is getting on a daily basis; they just don’t have time to process all of that."
- Christine Folck, Lead Innovation Designer, Kaiser Permanente
"I personally believe that the sooner FDA moves forward on providing that clarity that people have been asking for, the better."
- Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Health IT Coordinator, ONC
"Where [the surgeon will] make it and will be very proud of their invention, and basically send it out into the world as fast as possible, and try to get a patent, nurses make in a very, very quiet way. Nurses come from a culture of what they call a workaround, where they find little ways to work around the normal protocol to get the job done."
- Jose Gomez-Marquez, MIT
"Story’s the biggest difference between this game and the other games that exist on the AppStore. We want to make a game people will play again and again, not just for weeks but for months. And there’s not that many habits we do that often except, maybe, watching soap operas and watching TV."
- Adrian Hon, Co-Founder, Six to Start
“Others talk about prescribing apps [with platforms] like Happtique, what they really mean is recommending mobile apps, not adjudicating them at pharmacies and in compliance with state laws and FDA regulations. We are adjudicating this product through a pharmacy, which I don’t think a mobile health product has ever done before.”
- Chris Bergstrom, Chief Strategy & Commercial Officer, WellDoc
“You have to have at least one person in your organization who you can’t stand and don’t get along with, but you respect for their integrity.”
- Dr. Barry P. Chaiken, CMIO, Infor
"We can only accept medical dosage calculators submitted by the medicine's manufacturer."
- Apple rejection letter
"Our intent is to continue making additional data available to developers via APIs, including research information and wellness data. It is important to note that keeping patient information private and secure is a top priority at Kaiser Permanente and personal health information will not be made available externally via API technology."
- Phil Fasano, EVP & CTO, Kaiser Permanente
“The more intuitively obvious the data is, the lower the consumer engagement will be. Within sleep, we realized that simplistic sleep/wake data is simply not very motivating and will relegate this health metric to the back seat of behavioral change. However, when you are able to help consumers discover a new health unknown, such as the amount and vital roles of their REM, Deep and Light sleep, this new level of shock and awe may provide a better catalyst to engage the mainstream.”
- Dave Dickinson, Former CEO, Zeo
“We need to bring the exam room to where the patients are.”
- Dr. Jay Sanders, telemedicine pioneer
“We’re not assuming that you as a random person would be well-equipped to solve a particular case. But if we have a lot of people and a lot of cases, it’s not unlikely that someone in the crowd has a particular knowledge. Even though I’m not a doctor, if I was sitting next to someone on an airplane who had a very similar symptom set to my sister’s, I would say ‘I’m not a doctor, but you should look into what my sister had.’ So we’re trying to take that same phenomenon and add a lot more structure to it.”
- Jared Heyman, Founder, CrowdMed
“There isn’t a great mobile experience for healthcare yet.“
- Geoff Clapp, Co-Founder, Better
"This is where there probably is a creative tension between my own opinion and the industry's, but I don't think patient engagement should be a goal. What the goal should be is more asthma-free days... That whole patient engagement thing I'm hoping it's just a liminal period we go through. I'm not saying people shouldn't be involved in their disease -- but I am saying that people don't sell washing machines with the promise that you are going to 'engage' in the washing cycle. You want to put your clothes in, set it to wash, and be done."
- David Van Sickle, Co-Founder and CEO, Asthmapolis
"It is not clear why interventions delivered over mobile phones appear to be more effective. It could be due to convenience (and therefore adherence), intensity of the interventions (mobile phone interventions were more likely to have multiple daily contacts) or the behavior change techniques used by the interventions (mobile phone interventions were more likely to use cues to prompt behavior and provide rapid feedback afterwards)."
- Dr. Kingshuk Pal, Clinical Research Associate, University College London
“The Creative Destruction of Medicine — it’s the future!”
- Stephen Colbert, Host, The Colbert Report
“I have draft legislation which is coming out, which would be an express prohibition, prohibiting the FDA from getting into these mobile medical applications as a healthcare medical device.”
- Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
“Diagnosed atrial fib, rapid VR for a woman in distress today on a plane at 30K ft, no emergency landing req’d.“
- Tweet by Dr. Eric Topol, Scripps Health
“It’s easy to build a consumer-facing app that doesn’t connect to a hospital system. There is a great need in the hospital environment.”
- Naomi Fried, Chief Innovation Officer, Boston Children’s Hospital
“The Misfit Shine is a high tech one of these that tracks how much you not only walk but bike or swim.”
- Alex Trebek, Host, Jeopardy!
“Once a doctor ‘prescribes’ such a device, what are his responsibilities? Does this obligate the physician to 24/7/365 availability for EKG interpretations? How are HIPAA-compliant tracings sent between doctor and patient? How are the tracings and medical care documented in the (electronic) medical record? What are the legal risks to the doctor if the patient transmits OTHER patient’s EKG’s to OTHER people, non-securely? At this point, no one knows. We are entering into new, uncharted medicolegal territory.”
- Dr. Westby Fisher, internet, cardiologist, cardiac electrophysiologist, blogger
“Today, there are numerous non-traditional health service providers — Nike, Fitbit, Microsoft, Qualcomm — moving quickly into this space. And with health-related services like Asthmapolis or [Massive Health's] The Eatery sitting on an iPhone or Android screen beside Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook applications, the boundaries between lifestyle and life-care are blurring, perhaps even fading away.”
- Fabio Sergio, Executive Creative Director, Frog Design
“Massive Health was a company born from a passion to make products that make being healthy as easy as using an iPhone. By bringing together the best and brightest from Silicon Valley, we believed we could help galvanize a design renaissance in health. With this acquisition, we believe we’ve succeeded.”
- Massive Health’s website following its acquisition by Jawbone
“Everything I’ve been doing in my career has been geared toward participatory medicine. I just didn’t know it was called that.“
- Barbara L. Kornblau, Executive Director, Society for Participatory Medicine
“It sounds like science fiction, but Dr. Nancy Snyderman reports on how your smartphone may change medicine, including warning you of a heart attack.“
- NBC News anchor Brian Williams
“Based on these results, we posit that the field is entering a new ‘era’ where a body of rigorous evaluation of mHealth strategies is rapidly accumulating. The transition into an era of evidence-based mHealth supports our position that innovation in this domain can be evaluated with the same rigor as other public health strategies, attenuating some of the hype previously associated with mHealth.”
- Alain Labrique, Ph.D., Founding Director, Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative
“About 8 out of 10 health inquiries online start at a search engine. That was true in the year 2000 and it is true now. I’m not sure I’m going to be able ask this question in the same way in 2014, which is when I think we are going to be at a stage of ubiquitous mobile access. Some of the apps that have been introduced, diagnostic and health information apps — will it be that the marketshare for those will challenge search? That is a question I have and I don’t have data on it yet.”
- Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Pew
“Our biggest obstacle is that 70 percent of doctors don’t even know we exist. Epocrates is to healthcare IT what Angry Birds is to games.”
- Jonathan Bush, CEO, AthenaHealth
