CIO has an excellent summary of how HIT is attempting to cope with the tidal wave of mHealth. Moving away from the ‘look up, receive alerts’ passive mode versus being able to enter data on that mobile device (whether BYOD or hospital issue) means having to focus on architecture, infrastructure and governance priorities (rather than one-offs), fitting mobile into workflows (field discovery of clinical needs), alignment of IT with line-of-business departments and figuring out how patient engagement really works plus how it fits into the previous (and it’s not the hype of what developers would like to see and sell.) Healthcare IT Struggles to Keep Up With Mobile Health Demands
Sanitizing iPads: study
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/iPad-wash-me.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]It was inevitable–that the increased mobilization of in-hospital healthcare would lead to a study about reduction of microbial surface contamination leading to increased risk of nosocomial infection transmission. (Editor Steve and I were flagging this up in 2011 for both clinical devices and the patients!) Here’s the first study this Editor has seen on reducing the microbial load on iPads, and it’s out of Germany. Using a standard disinfectant–isopropanol tinted blue, otherwise known as alcohol, applied on the front, back and sides of the iPad in a six-step process–the procedure achieved a 98 percent + reduction compared to non-disinfected iPads. However this may violate the warranty, as the study warns! Study looks into standard disinfection of iPads in clinical setting (iMedicalApps)
So many apps, so little time
Over the past few days there seems to have been a particularly rich set of alerts related to mHealth apps (there’s even been an update to the mHealth Grand Tour website with a nice video to promote the tour that starts on 5th September). Adding to them a couple that others have kindly alerted me to, here are a few that might interest:
Let’s begin with an infographic on the rising popularity of mHealth apps that puts it all into context. However, in some countries mHealth is being held back by outdated privacy laws, and in the US lack of final FDA guidance is considered a check on progress. If you ever wondered how much data your DNA, or your most recent scan contained, (more…)
Addicted to mobile health? Telepsychiatry to the rescue!
Dr. Joseph Kvedar of Boston’s Center for Connected Health counted himself in this Editor’s camp as annoyed by the mHealth hype (inflicted by those we’ve dubbed the D3H—Digital Health Hypester Horde), and far more of a believer in SMS for health programs. His blog post is a ‘kind of edge’ towards thinking that mHealth can be habit-forming. In the CCH’s own clinical trials, more participants have smartphones (tracking the general population’s adoption) even with the lag among those with chronic disease (maybe a question of affordability?) and want apps. And then he sees the pattern of people checking their smartphone obsessively, like budgies with bells and mirrors….along with a study that indicates that patients with a passive sensor to upload blood glucose measurement, rather than pushing a button, were “significantly more adherent to their plan and had better health outcomes.” Not having to do something in the Diabetic’s Perpetual Battle of Stalingrad is addictive? Well, this is edging towards a nomination for ‘What in the Blue Blazes?” Could mobile health become addictive? (CHealth Blog) Hat tip to reader Bob Pyke via Twitter
Well, we can send Dr. K to a connected psychiatrist for a session of e-therapy. (more…)
GSMA Mobile 360, Brussels 5th September 2013
5 September 2013, Panoramic Hall, Square Brussels Meeting Centre
High level speakers and a goodly amount of the day committing to healthcare make this event look interesting.
Introducing the What in the Blue Blazes spot
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When touting telecare and telehealth, sadly occasionally one encounters negativity, so I try to avoid negative comment myself for fear of adding fuel to the fire. However, once in a while an item appears that really does pull you up short. So TTA has decided to introduce a “What in the Blue Blazes” spot, to which reader nominations are also encouraged.
Pride of place as first entry is a new research2guidance report, Mobile Health Trends and Figures 2013-2017, which will lighten your wallet by £812 for individuals, and considerably more for multiple access. The FierceMobile summary of the report is here.
As a (free) taster, this highlights 10 key trends that it reckons will shape the mHealth market until 2017. These include:
1. Smartphone user penetration will be the main driver for the mHealth uptake
2. mHealth applications will be tailored specifically for smartphones or tablets
6. Buyers will continue to drive the market
8. mHealth market will grow mainly in countries with high Smartphone penetration and health expenditure.
There are six more penetrating insights where these come from.
A caveat on the survey methodology is that the “324 opinion leaders and mHealth app publishers” surveyed are largely with early-stage companies, with a sprinkling of consultancies and major players thrown in. Could this put a rosier picture on commercialization, market sizing and barriers than is realistically warranted?
It is of course up to our readers to determine the report’s value. In the past, research2guidance reports have been favorably reviewed in TTA for their data analysis, which is also extensive here, and these can be of value. However for this Editor, it is our first ‘Blue Blazes’ award.
Internet training for older people vs works-out-of-the-box mobiles
Echoing last week’s “the world has moved on” post on the WSD, the 3G Doctor (David Doherty) has an excellent opinion piece on how AGE UK should spend the money given to it by Google for making it to the final six in the Global Impact Challenge that supports British non-profits using technology to tackle tough problems.
In discussing Age UK’s current plans to use the money to teach older people about the internet he says: “For the £500,000 AGE UK would spend on training 16,000 seniors they could give away (at retail price!) 10,000 of the latest designed for senior 3G CameraPhones from Doro. Works straight out of the box. No training required.”
Elsewhere on his site he has an interesting take too on the reasons behind O2’s announcement last week.
When mHealth and telehealth become ‘just healthcare’ (US)
GovernmentHealthIT reports that, speaking yesterday during the first day of the World Congress on mHealth and Telehealth in Boston, US, Jonah J. Czerwinski said Veterans Affairs (VA) had managed the health of some 500,000 people using telehealth in 2012. He expects this to rise to over 600,000 this year. He is senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where he leads the VA Center for Innovation. That’s some endorsement for telehealth!
“It’s connected healthcare – no ‘tele-,’ no ‘m-,'” he is reported to have told the audience: “This is just healthcare.”
Picking up on the topic of automating telehealth monitoring, he also described how the VitaLink home monitoring system, one of the VA’s more promising telehealth projects, has been developed by the VA from algorithms used in the mining industry to detect when drill bits embedded deep in the earth were stressed out and ready to fail.
mHealth reality: Complicated (Uganda)
Do we detect a slight air of surprise in the comment of Pia Rafller, one of the authors of a report by Yale University’s department of Political Science that “The findings do show that the reality is more complicated than at times we like to think, that information can have a different impact on different types of people”? The report was on an mHealth project designed by Google and the Grameen Foundation’s AppLab which allowed users in 60 central Ugandan villages to text questions on sexual and reproductive health to a server and receive pre-prepared responses from a database. The expectation was that the information would lead to a reduction of risky behaviour but it had some unintended consequences… Ugandan mHealth initiative increases ‘promiscuity’ IRIN Africa.
Semi-related item: Let’s hope that Orange Botswana takes note of the Ugandan experience: Orange Roll Out Telemedicine
Doctors wild about…what works
In the first half of the following blog item the author makes some valid points about doctors being quick to adopt mobile devices but that they were also quick to discover that the available apps are not much use in their work. The second half turns into a ‘knock Apple and big-up Windows 8 on tablets’ session. But then, as the author is Bill Crounse, MD, Senior Director, Worldwide Health at Microsoft, it would be surprising if he didn’t take that opportunity. Doctors wild about….. what works Hat tip to Bob Pyke.
UPDATE: related item, thanks to Toni Bunting: Health apps won’t reach core NHS patients (The Guardian). An NHS commissioner, writing under a pseudonym, also bemoans the lack of focus on appropriate apps and/or their use in the NHS. What the author focuses on is that the majority of NHS users are “the elderly, deprived and poorly-educated” and these people are less likely than most to be wielding and using smartphones.
Health tech growing fast in Brazil and Asia-Pacific
Brazil’s strong growth in mHealth and medical apps is detailed in three recent studies from PwC, PwC-GSMA, Research2Guidance and the New Cities Foundation. PwC is pegging mobile health apps at $46.6 million by 2015, with PwC-GSMA projecting that 43.9 million additional patients could be treated with mobile health technology in Brazil and Mexico by 2017. Research2Guidance confirms that Brazil’s an Android market, outselling iOS in the 10 most downloaded health and fitness apps by 17 times. The Geneva/Paris-based New Cities Foundation equipped doctors and nurses at a family clinic in Santa Marta, Rio de Janiero, Brazil with a $42,000 ‘backpack’ for home care, containing a GE Vscan portable ultrasound, a TuffSat pulse oximeter, an Accutrend blood monitor, an EKG machine, a blood pressure monitor, a weight scale, a digital thermometer, tape measure and stethoscope. Savings were about $200,000 per 100 patients/year. Mobihealthnews.
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”100″ /] The Gimlet Eye, having read this, just sent a message to your Editor. Could it be The Eye’s undisclosed location? Perhaps we should be… ‘Flying Down to Rio’?
In Asia-Pacific, the $55 billion APAC medical devices market–nearly 25 percent of the world market– is expected to grow over 10 percent per year over the next three years, outstripping rest-of-world growth by 4 points. Growth in China and India is especially striking, with India’s medical device growth at 16 percent per year for three years. Healthcare is improving in less developed areas, and the age 65+ population in greater developed countries is increasing as a proportion of the population as birth rates fall (in Japan, 24 percent–with Japan also the overwhelming leader in patents). While much broader than mobile health or telehealth, the overall category serves as a pointer to growth opportunities in the very near future. MD+DI Hat tip to reader George Margelis, MD via LinkedIn, who advocates Australia take a greater leadership position in developing ‘medtech’.
FDA regulation of mobile health: a study in ambiguity
The signs are not good when FDA continues to delay on issuing its draft guidance on mHealth devices (now tagged for the close of FY 2013), yet sends a notice to India’s Biosense Technologies Pvt Ltd, developer of the uChek Urine analyzer app, that it immediately needs to seek 510(k) Class II clearance. Biosense claims Class I clearance; FDA claims that it has no record. Letters fly, yet the app remains in the iPhone AppStore. How can there be a crackdown on mobile health apps, as FierceMobileHealthcare’s Greg Slabodkin projects, when developers legitimately say there’s no rules of the road? Magic 8 Ball says: ‘In The Fog’. Also Mobihealthnews.
Previously in TTA: FDA regulating medical apps–or not? The Hearings. If not FDA to regulate mHealth, then who? An ‘Office of mHealth’ a solution for FDA gridlock?
When mHealth becomes just Health (US)
Success In mHealth: Shifting Focus From The ‘m’ To The ‘Health’ (Forbes) is an interesting but curiously upside-down article, by which I mean that it would have more immediate appeal if it started with the final section When mHealth becomes just Health before unleashing the statistics. The author is Dr Alain Labrique, founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative.
Thai mHealth program to transform the health system
The application, Saraphi Health, and the mhealth project of which it is a critical element, receives funding from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. The purpose is to be able to build a digital archive to be used by the managers and developers of public healthcare policy. The aim is to improve the efficiency of dealing with urgent health situations. Mhealth program in Thailand uses app to collect medical data. MobileCommerceNews.
text4baby: positive study results (US)
Results from a year-long evaluation provide evidence that text4baby benefits users. text4baby is a free mobile health information service of the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB) that provides pregnant women and new mothers with health and safety information via text message. The content includes messages about immunization, nutrition, birth defect prevention, safe sleep, etc. A survey developed by researchers from the National Latino Research Center (NLRC) at California State University San Marcos and the University of California San Diego, with support from the Alliance Healthcare Foundation, was administered to 631 text4baby users in San Diego. Findings indicate that text4baby is increasing users’ health knowledge, facilitating interaction with health providers, reminding them of their appointments and immunizations, and improving access to health services. More information and link to the study results. Heads-up thanks to Bob Pyke.
GSMA mHealth Grand (cycle) Tour – Europe
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/mhealth-cycle-tour-route-2013.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]The mHealth Grand Tour will be a cycle ride with a difference. Going from Brussels to Barcelona in 13 days (5 – 19 September 2013), it is a 2,100km tour with more than 22,000 meters of climbs. But it is also an opportunity to help demonstrate ways of managing diabetes using mHealth. The ride is “also intended to be fabulous experience, incorporating breathtaking scenery, quiet country roads and the opportunity to sample fabulous food and wine. And, in the spirit of the Grand Tours of old, we have also designed the ride to take in the outstanding cultural sights on the way.” The tour is open to individuals, and sponsoring organisations are putting together some cycling teams too. More information on the tour website.
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