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mobihealthnews | February 19, 2009

Interview: U.N.-Vodafone and mHealth Alliance

"We really see such a huge opportunity here," said Claire Thwaites, head of the Vodafone Foundation and United Nations Foundation partnership. "There are 2.2 billion mobile phones in emerging markets and such a low number of PCs [only 305 million]. The number of healthcare workers and hospital beds are very, very low too. Mobile networks, of course, can be deployed much more easily than can fixed networks. The use of mHealth programs can really have a bigger impact on the ground when up against such barriers like not having hospital expertise for maybe hundreds of miles."

The potential opportunity for mHealth in emerging markets has been no secret to the tech industry, but a sweeping report just released by the Vodafone Foundation and U.N. Foundation partnership, which details some 50 mHealth pilots and programs going on around the world, makes the case clear: the time is now. mobihealthnews caught up with Thwaites, who is currently in Barcelona, Spain for the Mobile World Congress event, to discuss the formation of the mHealth Alliance, a group pulled together by the Vodafone and U.N. partnership as well as the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Vodafone and U.N. Partnership has been running mHealth programs for at least the past three years while working in conjunction with groups like the World Health Organization and other NGOs on the ground in Africa. Last July the Rockefeller Foundation hosted an event on eHealth that included a summit that drew 25 experts from both public groups and private industry who were stakeholders in the mHealth sector. The group included representatives from government agencies, international institutions, NGOs as well as executives from Microsoft, Qualcomm, Nokia, Vodafone and others.

"We wanted to get together because we felt that mHealth was really on the tipping point" Thwaites said. "There is a huge amount of programs going on around the world in pilot phases. We wanted to be able to share what we were doing and see what synergies there were. We made a commitment then to form a global mHealth Alliance." read more

CardioNet looks to dominate "wireless medicine"

CardioNet, the wireless-enabled cardiac monitoring company, once again reported stellar financials despite the current economic downturn. Quarterly revenue increased nearly 44 percent year-on-year while annual revenue increased 65 percent. The company has about $58 million in cash-on-hand and judging by many of the prepared statements attributed to the company's interim CEO, it sounds like CardioNet could be (should be?) gearing up for an acquisition spree since it plans on extending its footprint in wireless medicine out beyond cardiac monitoring.

"Looking forward, CardioNet is uniquely positioned within the healthcare industry and perhaps most industries today," Randy Thurman, CardioNet's interim president and CEO said in a statement. "We are leading what we believe is a revolution in healthcare - wireless medicine. The demand for our cardiac outpatient services is growing at greater than 40% per year. Our services provide significant and meaningful benefits to patients and prescribing physicians while delivering improved cost/benefit outcomes to the payors. Every indication is that CardioNet is positioned for years of exceptional growth. Read more for details on Cardionet's future plans.

AIDS.gov's guide to using text message reminders

There's no doubt that the Obama administration is looking to embrace technology to better the healthcare system, mobile technologies included. The AIDS.gov site has continued their ongoing four part series on using text messaging for appointment and medication reminders: This week's post focuses on cost. (Previous posts focused on the why and how of text message reminders).

"In tight economic times," the post reads, the costs of text message reminders "is a significant concern for many organizations. Can the cost of text messaging reminders ultimately save your organization time and money?" While the site never gives a firm answer to the question, it's all but encouraging hospitals and other caregivers to conduct pilots.

Whitman-Walker Clinic's Director of Medical Adherence, Justin Goforth noted that if you are encouraging patients to use free web portal-based text appointment reminders, the only cost is the time it takes to teach your staff to set the system up, but more secure and privacy-sensitive solutions that may integrate with patients' medical records can cost varying amounts. Some companies provide the service to non-profits for free or at reduced costs. Patient Prompts calculate cost per reminder at about 20 cents if the program is going to be ROI positive, depending on the number of users. Dr. Txt has a system that costs $199-a-month. That said, some patients may be charged extra for the text message they receive or send, depending on their current text messaging plan and mobile carrier, but unlimited text plans can start at $5-a-month from some mobile service providers. For this reason, it's good to include a caveat that regular text message prices will apply to the reminders, just to be sure the users know.

At the TEPR show earlier this month we heard other best practices for text message reminders--including sending "Happy Birthday" texts to patients to increase loyalty to the practice or instituting an automatic "How are you feeling?" text to patients after their visit.

Take a look at the blog.aids.gov site for more helpful hints on text message reminders.

2013: Disease Management worth $460M

While the more than $19 billion stimulus funds for healthcare I.T. don't specify it--they will help mHealth, PHR providers and health monitoring devices generate up to $460 million in revenue come 2013, according to a recent report by Parks Associates. The key is to target the disease management (DM) industry. Parks points not only to the Obama administration's stimulus package and reform plans, but also to overall changes to the healthcare landscape as drivers for accelerated technology spending during the next five years.

Parks writes that tech vendors already familiar with the unique characteristics and challenges present in the disease management business are likely to be in the best position to win contracts-in other words, too late for newcomers?

Check out Parks' most recent report, Disease Management Industry and High-Tech Adoption for more.

Microsoft: mHealth’s immediate challenges

"Mobile health by definition will become a necessary component of all healthcare," Microsoft's Director of Development for Consumer Health Solutions Oren Rosenbloom said last week at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Mobility Research Center (MRC) in Silicon Valley. "Technology has created the expectation that you can take your office with you where ever you go and you can communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. Increasingly family health managers interact with their pediatricians, their personal doctors, and the health and wellness providers of their aging and often remote parents via secure/insecure email and cell phones."

Rosenbloom said the most immediate questions mHealth pilots need to answer are:

Can we empower patients/consumers to take an important role in managing their chronic disease ?
Will patient outcomes improve with better data integrity and compliance?
Can clinician efficiency improve by having more reliable and up-to-date data?
Can we improve the quality of a patient visit and reduce the length of appointment time with more integrated physician and patient involvement in disease treatment?
Can we reduce cost by using "off the shelf" home medical devices and leveraging patient's existing home computer and Internet connection?

Read on for the mHealth lessons learned so far, according to Rosenbloom.

Qualcomm: mHealth collapses time and space

Carnegie Mellon's CyLab MRC hosted a number of wireless health luminaries last week--we already covered the talk by Microsoft--now the CyLab blog has a post covering Qualcomm Vice President for Business Development in Health and Life Sciences Don Jones' presentation, called "Wireless Health Connectivity Collapses Time and Space."

"There are four billion cell phones in use in the world today," Jones observed, "three billion more than any other computing or consumer electronic device. The phone," he said, "is the most personal device."

Qualcomm, a longtime proponent of mHealth, is focused on Body Area Network (BAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) mobile healthcare strategies, which already include commercial products (like Cardionet's). Many remain in clinical trials.

During his presentation Jones highlighted another mobile cardio company: CardioMEMS, which develops wireless implants. Jones also covered smart Band-Aids (presumably by Johnson & Johnson since that's their copyrighted term) for future mobile fitness services, and highlighted CHEALCOMM as a leader in the healthcare hub at home space.

Jones said CardioMEMS features "miniature implantable sensors, which use radio frequency energy to transmit real-time data and communicate this information to the patient's physician for the management of patients with congestive heart failure."

Smart Band-Aids will help people to measure and wirelessly transmit information while working out, he explained, while the CHEALCOMM home health hub lets users capture and wirelessly transmit vital signs, too.

For more of Jones' talk at CyLab check out the blog post and link for his presentation.

Safety, security hold up wireless drug delivery

The prospect of wireless-enabled implants that ensure timely and correct dosages of medicine for those unable to care for themselves is fast approaching clinical reality but according to some researchers, the safety and security of these remote intelligent drug delivery systems (RIDDS) still need to be worked out. YanYan Wang and Carey Thaldorf at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, USA, and colleague John Haynes of Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia are set to publish a paper about security concerns for RIDDS in the upcoming printing of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.

"We have raised security concerns in relation to RIDDS, especially in the context of medical sensor networks, because, among other reasons, a failure to do so could risk the privacy and possibly the life of a patient," the team said. "The dilemma in RIDDS makes adoption of the technologies intimidating," they add. The team concludes that, "Security mechanisms for RIDDS must be fully considered prior to the widespread deployment of such delivery systems." Read more

NDoc+AirClic save home care clinic $70K

Thornberry Limited announced today that its NDoc partnership with AirClic has helped Syracuse-based St. Joseph's Certified Home Health Care Agency save nearly $70,000 with its mobile phone-centered service. The NDoc+AirClic solution helps home care agencies more efficiently document care, time and mileage as well as communicate with the office. St. Joseph's saved the $70,000 over the past year while it was using Thornberry Limited's service, which helped the agency cut down on missed appointments. Read the company's press release to learn more.

More on Mobihealthnews.com...

Nokia lauds mPedigree, med verification app
FDA approves Transoma’s wireless ECG
Australian CEO: Time to invest in mHealth
Alcatel-Lucent develops remote patient monitoring
Launch: Medtronic’s Reveal XT ECG monitor

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mobihealthnews | February 19, 2009

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