Dana Blankenhorn of ZD Net has covered how “wireless health” has been “showered with money” and “given enough corporate partners to choke a horse” but warns that “it may be too rich”.
I’m in complete agreement. The barrier to entry into the mHealth market (eg. start texting your patients, start giving them mobile access to your services etc) is so low for qualified medics and established medical practices that I can only see such generous charitable support failing to achieve focus on real patient needs.
The mobile industry is full of lessons of triumph from adversity eg. the Smartphone User Experience had to await the arrival of a new smartphone manufacturer before fundamental user experience transformation despite wide criticism of touchscreens at launch eg. “I’ll never use it as I need a full qwerty keyboard on my mobile phone”.
We’ve seen this before with the likes of the mHealth Alliance from the UN Foundation and Vodafone (who pledged $5 million of support to this charitable effort). Despite the years that have passed Vodafone still have no Health content on their Vodafone LIVE! portal, and the free market is still innovating in areas where their parent organisations should’ve been able to have influence (eg. 100% charitable SMS Donations to Haiti was an initiative of AT&T, Indian 3G Auctions passed without any nod towards their potential to contribute to improved health of citizens).
It’s surprising that I can already sense signs of the complacency that this research cash surplus is having on the West Wireless Institute eg. watching Donald Casey’s (unmissable) video keynote from the recent Qualcomm Wireless Life Science Alliance event:
19.30-21.03: “we’ve had the privilege here at the Institute of having 30 companies come visit us in the past 2 months and everyone of them has said: ‘Geez, if only CMS would get on the bandwagon’. Know what guys? The earth is round, the sky is blue, CMS is going to get around to reimbursing us correctly on or around 2020-25. We could argue about it, we can ask Paul (Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm) ‘can we borrow the jet and go storm CMS Headquarters’. They don’t care. Fundamentally if you look at you know the demonstration projects… what is a demonstration project? On we’re going to figure this out. So it’s 18 months of public argument. 12 months to implement. 18 months to read. 18 months to argue about it. Seven-and-a-half-Years from conception of a demo project to when there is a change in the system. To be honest in 7 and a 1/2 years… I mean just look at the technology Paul showed today (SmartPhones & BioSensors) versus what is going to be available in a year. Do we really think that our industry is going to sit around and wait for CMS to spend 8 years? But rather waiting for that, I would challenge everyone in the room to – and the checklist if I was a venture person that I would ask – ‘have you talked ex-US?’ You know what, Primary Care Trust’s in the UK (have a) very different approach. You look at France, you look at Germany, you look at Japan, all these countries have basically a single payer system that understands if I am going to have to manage the costs of someone over a lifetime and will pay for secondary prevention. Yet we’re all going to sit here and we’re all going to hold hands and say ‘These bad people at CMS’ – well it’s an ex-US, we’re a global business”
If such a capable CEO was running a for-profit company with this clear insight into such a major adoption barrier within the local market I could not imagine the company not planning to relocate geographically at least some of its operations to these more advantageous locations – in order to avoid rather than fight these nonsensical but very real barriers to adoption.
