SAN FRANCISCO—There are surveys that show Americans would not only like to use mobile healthcare services but also are willing to pay for them. The question, as with mobilizing other kinds of services or applications, is how to reach a mass-market reality.
The answer may come down to politics, healthcare reform and insurance, according to panelists at a mobile health panel at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications show Thursday.
Azita Arvani, principal of the business consulting firm Arvani Group, said a recent Price Waterhouse survey showed most Americans like the idea of having access to remote healthcare and that about 40 percent would pay to have a mobile monitoring device that would communicate with their physician.
The survey also showed that more than half of the physicians who use mobile devices in their practices believe the devices speed up their healthcare decision-making.
If there is this level of interest from both consumers and providers, Arvani asked the panel, what is holding mHealth back? The panelists included Alex Brisbourne, president and COO of KORE Telematics; Eleanor Chye, executive director of AT&T's mHealth unit; Vivian Funkhouser, head of global healthcare solutions for Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions; Clint McClellan, senior director of business development for Qualcomm's Health & Life Sciences unit, and Jim Pursley, general manager of sales and marketing for GE Healthcare's Aging Services.
The panelists agreed that government mandates for electronic medical records plays in favor of mHealth, but several also said a business model needs to be developed. Arvani said there also are liability and security concerns, questions about interoperability among hardware and software, and providing support for services.
Brisbourne said KORE's healthcare business using the company's machine-to-machine technology has started taking off. Mobile healthcare represented just 1 percent of new business in 2008 and is expected to rise to 23 percent this year, he said.
Chye said mobile health care is important to AT&T not just as a business opportunity but also for the well-being of its employees, retirees and dependants. AT&T looks at mobile healthcare for its ability to provide value, she said, and not as a cost center.
Mobile healthcare, according to Funkhouser, is going to see wider use for the simple fact that healthcare reform is going to mean more patients will be treated outside the hospital or medical office.
Pursley agreed, saying reform means healthcare will need to be delivered at lower cost but with higher quality, which are two elements that mHealth can address. GE and Intel announced a joint healthcare venture in August to bring healthcare into homes, especially for seniors and those with chronic conditions.
The technology and devices already exist to enable mHealth, McClellan said, adding that basic phones and health monitors can be used now. "It is really about putting the pieces together," he said.
Several panelists said insurance companies will play a role in the future of mHealth, especially whether or not they will underwrite mobile healthcare devices. Funkhouser said as insurance plans migrate from co-payments to deductible plans, there will be more incentive for insurers, providers and patients to look at the use of mHealth as valuable prevention tools that ultimately save costs.
In a separate interview, Funkhouser also talked about how mobile devices in hospitals can save time for providers. Hospital nurses, she said, can cut in half the distance they walk during a shift, as well as the time they are tethered to a wired phone simply by using a wireless handset.
She said nurses typically walk 4 miles during a shift, traveling among different patients. If a nurse is seeing one patient and gets a call over the hospital intercom, the nurse has to walk back to the nurses' station to find out what is wrong and then respond to another patient to find out what is wrong. After resolving whatever the new issues might be, the nurse can return to the first patient.
This travel, much of which is unproductive, can be reduced significantly with a handset using VoIP over WLAN, such as the new Motorola MC75. The handset runs the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.
Funkhouser said the vast majority of hospitals in the United States have Wi-Fi networks now, although they may only be in portions of the hospital like the emergency room or surgical unit. But federal incentives to ensure patient safety is pushing hospitals further down the road to ubiquitous wireless networks, devices and applications. The only resistance comes from IT departments that are reluctant to manage WLANs, but this creates an opportunity for outsourcing these tasks, she said.
Motorola Solutions' healthcare devices are similar to those used in warehouses, including barcode scanners, but are more rugged and can be sanitized and disinfected repeatedly. The barcode scanners, which are one-and-two-dimensional, are used to scan patient wrist bands, caregiver authentication codes and procedure codes.
These are part of what Funkhouser calls following the "five rights" of healthcare – the right patient, right medicine, right time, the right dose and the right route. There is a federal mandate to reach these goals by 2014, "so the rush is on to do this now," she said.