What’s wrong with mHealth? Ask Rube Goldberg…. Part I | LargePond

What's wrong with mHealth? Ask Rube Goldberg.... Part I 2011-01-05 16:47:46

I attended a meeting the other day where buzzwords like “mhealth”, ehealth, “connected health,” “wireless health”, and a slew of others (collectively “xhealth”) were thrown around the room like confetti at a parade.

At one point, the discussion became pretty heated around the attributes of the mhealth market compared to ehealth as well as which was higher in the perceived health information technology (HIT) hierarchy.  I listened carefully as each participant passionately shared their unique point of view about the size and definition of each respective market and, of course, how their company was positioned to be the market leader.  I have to admit, it was pretty tempting to jump in especially when someone in the group tried to create a new buzzword in an effort to plant their flag in yet another nebulous and ill-defined mobile healthcare niche.

In the race for healthcare innovation, coining buzzwords, and carving up prospective market segments, it seems like people have lost sight of the real prize — adoption. Specifically, near-term adoption.

via alargepond.com

Excellent read, you can read part II here: http://goo.gl/pJ95M

Freemium in care: Zorgbeheer care-platform looking for webdev

Zorgbeheer (dutch for 'care management') is a platform for Flemish care-managers since 2006.
It grew from a small private communication platform for carehome owners to a communication platform for the captains of care.
The website has about 5 to 600 unique visitors a day.
There's a strong demand for further development, which should take the platform from it's current situation (stage 1) to a perpetual stage 3.

Stage 1

Mostly inspection, supervision and small improvements of the current situation.

Stage 2

Major overhaul with open source CMS (Joomla, Drupal, ...) or own development.
Improvements in matchmaking
Offering mobile content

Stage 3

Crowdsourcing care professionals for needs and building web and mobile apps to fill those needs ... and offering the apps for free.

Where's the money?
First two stages will be paid by commercial revenues (ads).
During the last (perpetual) stage, the webdev company can develop apps for individual care organisations too. The webdev business card being a solid (and proven) reputation as Zorgbeheer-platform-builder.

Why in English? It's a site in Dutch!
As far as I know, there are no platforms offering the stage 3 solution; improving care by offering web and mobile tools for free.
This format might be interesting for international development.

Requirements

• Good knowledge of Joomla CMS (in stage 1)
• Proficiency in mobile development
• Experience with mapping, communication and community (matchmaking) tools
• Determined to produce apps that are Fisher Price easy.

You can improve care AND earn a living.
Win-win!
Contact: bart at mhealth BE

2011 Predictions in Medicine, Healthcare, Technology and Innovation « ScienceRoll

2) Curation -> will there be a market for RSS-feed experts, offering you a tailorfit newsoffer?
4) Mhealth will be a entire ecosystem (identification, payment, location, monitoring, etc.). Lots of apps will try to ‘plug in’ to EHR’s, which will leverage their usefulness enormously. Question here is: “Can mobile operators cope with the sudden increase in 3G/4G data usage?”.
6) The importance of ‘voice’: i fully agree. But don’t underestimate the imortance of interface design (simplicity – i like the term ‘fisher price design’)
12) Will we also see patients that are so empowered that they will be doing live reporting from the hospital? Or broadcast an ‘investigation’ in realtime?
14) SoMe presence in pharma … but also in care-institutions. Mainly deployed for recruitment purposes, painting a pleasant SoMe environment.

If i may add 2:
explosion of tech for boomers
data-mining of health data

via scienceroll.com

Senior housing should lead with tech-enabled service to drive costs down

that the current approaches are unsustainable and so last-century

via ageinplacetech.com

Baby boomers do NOT want to go to a senior house,
the cost to house them in a senior house are unsustainable anyway.
And if the cost would be sustainable, there wouldn't be (human) staff to take care of customers.
There's only one way to cope with these problems and that's at home monitoring, collaborative (family) caring and preventive medicine. Mhealth can play a major role in these 3 solutions.

Improve patient - doctor communication with a smartphone

Dutch insurer VGZ made this great iPhone app (Android coming soon) to improve communication between patient and doctor.

After accepting the User Agreement you can use this app to:

• prepare your visit to the doctor by taking notes (you can use a FAQ for your specific medical problem)
• use these notes (checklist) during the visit
• you can even record (by doctors consent) the doctors diagnose

All notes and recorded material are for personal use only and can't be published publicly.

Other features include finding your doctor by GPS and/or rating the service by certain criteria.

I really like the FAQ-feature where you can have a look at questions that most people -with a similar medical problem- ask their doctors.

YouTube Dutch version

Combine this with the increase of 70+ using inet (Pew)

Report: 70 percent want access to mHealth - http://pulsene.ws/xFXY

Pew Internet found out that the biggest growing group of internet users are seniors.
They will rapidly switch to mobile because of simplicity (touchscreens and user experience).
Great combination for mhealth.

Love posterous even more

The recently released groups are already awesome. I love the possibility to quickly switch between the 'regular' site and the groups-site.
Beta for one week for crowdsourcing and bugtracking ... and then releasing it. Talking about fastdevelopment!
And the Posterous Android app, which i'm using to post this, is also extremly easy to use. Big WOW is the easyness to post accross different Posterous sites.