John Maschenic visits a lot of hospitals in his role as director of healthcare solutions for Verizon Wireless. More than a few times, he's been asked about improving the in-building coverage in settings that just a few short years ago were shooing wireless devices out the door rather than embracing them.
The irony is not lost on Maschenic, and the 180-degree turns that hospitals and other healthcare establishments are making toward wireless may be indicative of the changes that are occurring in mHealth. But he sees the changes as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Changes occur in stages, from the doctors who early on adopted Palm devices to the nurses who make house calls and patients who get medication reminders.
While boosting coverage in a hospital is a form of wireless local area networking (WLAN), another acronym making its way into the wireless lexicon may be BAN, or body area networking, with the kind of wearable technology that reads body fluctuations. For example, a bandage might read bacterial count and dispense antibiotics accordingly. Or an implanted insulin pump in the body might automatically dispense insulin as needed.
Those are mostly future applications, however. In the meantime, the word of the day may be "patience." If you talk to any wireless industry professional about mHealth, chances are the topic of business modeling will come up. Verizon Wireless, for example, can't change the modeling around reimbursement policies for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Maschenic says. However, he and other wireless health advocates are encouraged that U.S. healthcare reform will lead to more opportunities for mHealth.
Advancing Wireless Health
Driving new business models is something the not-for-profit West Wireless Health Institute (WWHI) is trying to do. WWHI's primary mission is to cut healthcare costs by accelerating the availability of wireless medical technology. The institute is still relatively young – it was formed last year and just hired its first CEO a couple months ago – but it's got some serious backers and a lot of support from the San Diego community where it's based.
The WWHI was founded by the Gary and Mary West Foundation with the help of Dr. Eric Topol from Scripps Health and Don Jones of Qualcomm. WWHI Chairman Gary West has said they helped solidify for him that it was the right thing to do at the right time. Qualcomm remains a Technology and Educational partner for WWHI and Scripps Health is the institute's Healthcare Affiliate.
Qualcomm certainly is no stranger to the combination of wireless and healthcare. Last week, the company resurrected Lifecomm with the help of Hughes Telematics and American Medical Alert Corporation. Lifecomm plans to launch a mobile Personal Emergency Response Service (PERS) focused on seniors and their caregivers in the United States in 2011. The PERS solution consists of a wearable device with one-touch access to an emergency assistance call center.
The WWHI got some good news of its own last week with another grant from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, this time in the amount of $20 million, to support biomedical engineering research. That's on top of the initial $45 million the foundation gave last year. The latest grant also will be used to support the institute's recently launched Postdoctoral Program, which is training students in the field of wireless health.
Later this year, the WWHI plans to establish an office in Washington, D.C.; it sees itself as a resource for entrepreneurs as well as government entities. "We think we have a pretty significant role to play," says Don Casey, who was appointed CEO of WWHI in March. He's former worldwide chairman of Johnson and Johnson's Comprehensive Care group.
NEED DRIVES DEMAND
Wireless is moving away from that "nice to have" category to a necessity, he says. Fewer healthcare professionals are available, yet more and more people will need healthcare solutions as the Baby Boomer generation gets older. In its National Broadband Report, the FCC pointed out that by 2040, twice as many Americans will be older than 65 as there are today.
Casey says it's all about "infrastructure independent" healthcare, which involves providing the right care, at the right time, wherever the person may be. That's not to be confused with an emergency room whereby a person goes to a set location to get their care. Rather, it's more about setting up systems where the patient may not even need to see a doctor in person if they're being monitored and managed wirelessly.
The WWHI is working on clinical trials and hopes to have one or two internally developed products within a year. It also has been forging relationships with like-minded organizations.
One of those is GE Healthcare, which is collaborating with WWHI on a variety of research, technology and educational initiatives focused on accelerating wireless health solutions. WWHI says its technology and educational partnerships are based on the mutual exchange of ideas, technical assistance and expertise and do not include any exchange of funds.
"The wireless space and wireless technologies are going to have a big role to play," says Munesh Makhija, general manager of systems and wireless at GE Healthcare. "We're very much in tune to that."
One of the products in GE Healthcare's Carescape portfolio is the Mobile Viewer, whereby a clinician can view a patient's test results or other information on a mobile device without having to be in a specific place within a healthcare facility – they can view it wherever they happen to be.
Getting patients up and walking after surgery or some other procedure tends to lead to better outcomes, Makhija says, and GE Healthcare's line of products includes the ability to monitor a patient with a small pager-sized device when they're recovering. Updates on their progress are sent to clinicians, improving the work flow and helping patients recover faster.
But it's not all about products and solutions. GE Healthcare also works as an advocate. One component in the FCC's National Broadband Plan is a proposal to identify and allocate spectrum for body sensor networks, and GE Healthcare is one of the advocates for that.
Who knows? One day, maybe people will have their own personal wireless area networks to call their own. It will just be a matter of who pays for it.