“1. You are in your 70’s and had a fall and rendered your shoulder unusable with a rotator cuff injury. You need a steroid injection; i can’t refer you because that service is not open currently. You pay to go privately because you can’t function in simple personal activities”
“2. You are 38 & have been trying desperately for a child. We have done the work up for the fertility clinic & you know the wait list is very long (6m +). I refer you and it gets rejected; ‘we are not accepting new referrals due to covid for at least 3m”. Thats your valuable time”
To be completed
“3. You have an appointment to discuss your knee replacement. Your mobility is so compromised you can’t walk to the end of the road. The appointment is rescheduled for 6m. You are trapped indoors; gaining weight, mood deteriorating, can’t visit friends/relatives”
To be completed
“4. You spend 3 days in labour but your partner can only come for the last few hours to delivery. He can only stay for an hour after. Baby goes to NICU for a week and you stay in but partner is not allowed back AT ALL to visit you or new baby. You have PTSD from the experience.”
To be completed
“5. You go for your 8 week pregnancy scan and tragically the baby has died and there is no heartbeat. You are on your own for this news because your partner was not allowed to come to the scan.”
To be completed
“6. You are shielding at home alone. Your only contact with the outside world is via telephone and you have a recurring ear wax problem meaning you can’t hear/use the phone. I can’t get your ears syringed. You have pay to have it done privately if you want it.
To be completed
“7. You have been having chemo for terminal but controlled cancer. You are due a scan to check control in March. You receive a phone call to say that you are ‘no longer a candidate for treatment’ due to covid. You spend the next 4m of your life shielding, not living.
To be completed
“8. You have a vaginal prolapse. Your ring pessary needed changing in March. It has been cancelled. Things are deteriorating. You have to go to the toilet 10x a night and worsening. You are exhausted, in pain and no new date to change it.
To be completed
“9. The the date for the scheduled hysterectomy which will sort the problem more permanently is cancelled indefinitely.
To be completed
10. You are waiting for a cataract operation. The pre appointment was May. It has been rescheduled for March. You can’t drive, you can’t work. Your anxiety is spiralling.
To be completed
11. You need a Mirena coil fitted for your HRT. You can’t use other methods because they are not working and you are bleeding. Your symptoms are debilitating so you need HRT just to function. Sexual Health services for this closed.
To be completed
12. You are disabled by a specific mental health issue. I manage to get a referral accepted into the best clinic for this in London, out of area, so not easy. Appointment cancelled and will not give a date for resumption of services. Your mental health is deteriorating.
To be completed
13. You have been told that your hip surgery can’t be scheduled currently because the list is now so long. Meanwhile you can’t exercise, shop, go upstairs at home.
To be completed
“For clarity; I can always get 2 week wait cancer referrals accepted and patients seen within 2 weeks. This has been the case throughout. But just because it isn’t cancer and it may sound trivial, there is an individual suffering and for them it is often life changing”
Concerns over the Coronavirus have created exceptional circumstances in which the annual meeting of the $Trillion Mobile Industry (Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) has been cancelled. On Monday the 24th February 2020 we will be gathering together world leaders in the use of mHealth to produce a seminar that will inform and educate attendees on where mHealth is today (after a decade that was defined by the convergence of mobile and health) and the best practice and lessons that can be drawn from the current methods being deployed to manage and contain Coronovirus.
The “mHealth in Times of Crisis: the Coronavirus” event will be live streamed and made available to watch/share free of charge and we intend for it to provide a best practice resource that can help prevent and manage future emerging viral pandemics.
Agenda/Timings (we’re still finalising the program so please refresh this page to see updates):
9am Opening Keynote
Li-Qun Xu (Chief Scientist, China Mobile Research Institute)
As Chief Scientist of the Research Institute of China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC), Li-Qun leads primarily the R&D activities of CMCC’s in M2M area in general and in mHealth applications and services in particular, responsible for setting the viable business strategy, establishing core research competence in related disciplines, and building an open, scalable and intelligent platform for delivering end-to-end mHealth services. This involves close collaboration with CMCC’s business operations divisions, medical device vendors, healthcare solution providers, academics and healthcare professionals in the value-chain, leveraging CMCC’s huge customer base, ubiquitous network coverage and multiple networking capabilities.
In 2006 David co-founded 3G Doctor, a service providing fully documented Mobile Video Consultations with registered Doctors. Since then he’s made it his mission to ensure it remains the world’s best Doctor video consulting service. 3GDoctor has an open approach to innovation and seeks to collaborate to help bring new mHealth and wellness services to market through our unrivalled appreciation of the needs for improved access, quality, safety and patient privacy. David’s work has been cited by the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Harvard Business Review and other leading publications.
Janet has been in the Health, Social Care and WellBeing profession for over 25 years and has spent the last five years growing the brand Yecco (a social media platform for carers) in the health and social care market. Janet has a wealth of experience and contacts within the space of retail, technology, insurance and public and private healthcare sector.
10:30am “Livestreaming Conferences: Why, How and Now”
John read Eric Topol MD’s book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, and it changed the course of his life. And it was fortuitous, too, because his total dedication to digital medical content curation on the net combines his two passions; healthcare and computers. InternetMedicine.com makes it possible to have ONLINE Medical conferences and is gathering people from around the world to discuss medical topics. These conferences prove to be less expensive, more convenient, and increasingly more popular. The sharing of the minds and networking are the two core traits of a medical conference and with the right tools we’re showing that it can be done very effectively online. In the event of an infectious disease pandemic it’s critical that education and best practice are available when and where needed and InternetMedicine have the expertise and experience to help medical organisations make the transition online.
10:50am “How Mobile has transformed the Doctor/Patient Relationship”
Dr Fiona Kavanagh MRCGP (coFounder, 3G Doctor).
Fiona graduated in 1998 from University College Dublin (Ireland) and qualified as a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 2003. Fiona has enjoyed a wealth of relevant experience including work with the worlds most famous remote care service the “flying doctors”.
11:10am “How mobile has transformed the Medical Record”
Kate is a physician and global health industry specialist with broad experience in developed and developing country settings. Kate has globally recognized expertise in health workforce and health systems and have served on expert panels for the World Health Organization, World Bank, Institute of Medicine, Global Business Schools Network, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), PEPFAR, Hope Street Group, and the African Union. Kate currently serve as CEO of Corvus Health, a global health workforce services firm. Corvus Health provides recruitment, staffing, training, HR management, teleHR, and quality improvement and provides advisory services to governments, hospitals, health professional schools, health professional associations, and regulators. Previously Kate worked as Vice President of Health Systems Innovation for IntraHealth International, a global health nonprofit. Kate led IntraHealth’s work on new private sector business, and other responsibilities included digital health, global health security, facility data, and health economics. Kate served as the Director of USAID’s CapacityPlus Project, the world’s largest global health workforce program. I was responsible for increasing global production of health workers, including physicians and nurses and for developing and expanding systems that increase health worker retention, productivity, and quality of care. Kate represented the World Bank in Asia and Africa and worked with country governments to provide technical assistance and financing for projects on health systems efficiency, human resources for health, public-private partnerships, and water and sanitation, etc. Kate served as Coordinator for the Africa Health Workforce Program, working with in Africa to help solve the global health worker shortage. Our program achievements included expanding new worker training, increased worker retention in under-served areas, and maximizing worker productivity.
11:50am “Monitor and manage your child’s health with the eRedBook”
Jill has worked extensively in Healthcare in the UK and spent time commissioning a Hospital in Africa. She is first and foremost a force for change. Someone who understands organisations and how to get the best out of the people to deliver change. She has an inclusive style which recognises that creativity and achievement and success is based on a mixture of skills, behaviours, beliefs and capabilities converging together. Jill has high energy and has worked in the NHS at Executive level and in the Private sector at Senior Consultant & Delivery Director level. She has delivered complex IT & Change Programmes of up to £100million in value with teams comprising directly employed staff and a range of subcontractors across multiple organisations over a wide geography. She has spoken at a number of conferences about how process change isn’t enough and to have a truly transformational approach you have to move people with you, engaging them and prompting them to think differently and to embrace change.
Social innovator, renowned director and global humanitarian Firdaus Kharas produces animation, documentaries, films and television series designed to educate, entertain, and change societal and individual behavior via a process he calls Culture Shift. His goal is to positively influence viewers’ knowledge, attitude and behavior, especially that of children and young adults, in order to better the human condition.
Kharas’ work provides innovative solutions to some of the world’s toughest issues by confronting and overcoming the fault lines which separate us: language and culture; religion and ethnicity; tradition and history; stereotype and stigma; racism and prejudice; hatred and fear. “I get around the obstacles that separate human beings. I go beyond them to think of us as a human family. Using basic, core human values, we can take any issue and create cross-cultural campaigns to tackle those issues and save or improve the lives of people”, says Kharas. In a nutshell, Firdaus Kharas’ work saves lives.
12:30pm “The convergence of Medicines & Diagnostics to Mobile”
Professor Sam Lingam MD (Hons) FRCPCH FRCP (Glas) DCH DRCOG (Harley Street Paediatric Chambers).
In 1984 Sam established the Medical Express Clinic at 117A Harley Street as London’s first walk-in clinic. Staffed 7 days a week by a highly skilled team of friendly, empathetic staff that I have hand picked to ensure we can accurately find and treat the root cause of your health issues and work together with you to achieve your personal health goals.
Sam’s private clinic on Harley Street provides a comprehensive range of medical care for children and adults and we welcome all patients, from overseas visitors and daily commuters, to Londoners looking for an exceptional private clinic. Walk in or pick up the phone and make an appointment today and we will ensure you will get to quickly see an expert Harley Street consultant from the relevant specialty.
1pm “More than 80 clinical trials have been launched to test coronavirus treatments but none of them are Mobile First designed, why does this matter?”
1:20pm “How using mobiles to take the Medical History can help diagnose Coronavirus & improve the safety of Vaccines”
TBC
2pm “FakeNews, Conspiracy Theories & Coronavirus… Who can I Trust?”
Jon Rappoport, Investigative Reporter, NoMoreFakeNews.com
John is a graduate of Amherst College (BA, Philosophy) who has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. He is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX and has written articles on politics, health, media, culture and art for LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, Village Voice, Nexus, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. In 1982, the LA Weekly submitted his name for a Pulitzer prize, for his interview with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus. Jon has hosted, produced, and written radio programs and segments in Los Angeles and Las Vegas (KPFK, KLAV). He has appeared as a guest on over 200 radio and television programs, including ABC’s Nightline, Tony Brown’s Journal (PBS), and Hard Copy. In 1996, Jon started The Great Boycott, against eight corporate chemical giants: Monsanto, Dow, Du Pont, Bayer, Hoechst, Rhone-Poulenc, Imperial Chemical Industries, and Ciba-Geigy. The Boycott continues to operate today. Jon has lectured extensively all over the US on the question: Who runs the world and what can we do about it? Since 2000, Jon has operated largely away from the mainstream because, as he puts it, “My research was not friendly to the conventional media.” Over the last 30 years, Jon’s independent research has encompassed such areas as: deep politics, conspiracies, alternative health, the potential of the human imagination, mind control, the medical cartel, symbology, and solutions to the takeover of the planet by hidden elites.
Refresh this page to see updates and complete the following form if you’d like to register to attend (it’s completely free) or have suggestions/ideas for the organisers:
Here’s a video of a talk I gave in 2014 which is an useful backgrounder on the opportunity for GPs to safely offer documented video consults:
Surely the RCGP could’ve put a easy to watch/share video like this together for quick distribution to GPs and their teams during this lockdown?
Consulting Patients Vs. talking to complete strangers
The ‘Introducing yourself’ slide really highlights why it’s pretty much a catastrophic failure from the outset if we have highly experienced GPs talking to Patients when there hasn’t been some data shared before hand. I wonder why GPs don’t ask themselves why no other successful service provider in 2020 is doing this as surely when they ring utility companies or even to book a haircut or a plumber they realise that the company is using a ‘Customer Relationship Management’ software to improve business relationships and manage the company’s relationship/interactions with you?
This slide is clearly written by a GP who has never used a Video Consultation to effectively communicate with a Patient. The RCGP should be summoning Doctors who have actual first hand experience eg. Dr Amir Hannan, Dr Rupert Bankart, any of the GPs that are already using the Engage Consult Consultation system from Engage Health:
Closing the consultation
This advice from the RCGP has fundamentally overlooked the importance of the Doctor sending a copy of their notes and advice to their Patient. Without this the Patient is going to have to rely on recall or will be encouraged to surreptitiously record the consultation for their own records (which can lead to extensive issues with regard to misinterpretation, privacy, medical negligence claims, etc, etc).
The best way in our experience to close a consult is by providing a Patient with access to a copy of the medical history information they submitted, a summary of the advice the Doctor gave and links to additional sources of information they might find useful (eg. websites, online videos they can watch, etc, etc) and a means of providing feedback to build in a means by which we can learn from Patients on ways to improve the service.
The telcos really are dead set on shooting themselves in the foot as they attempt to roll out 5G without addressing basic reservations held by people who have been detained within their homes as a result of what they’re told by the media is a deadly virus that either originated accidentally from a Laboratory or a Wet Market in Wuhan China.
Instead of investing in efforts to explain to the public the obvious things like what 5G is, why it’s needed, how it’s being paid for, what it will be used for and how they can ensure it’s never weaponised they’ve instead took to using government power and their influence with website owners to prevent online discussion.
I see that the discussions are already being throttled with shadow banning on Twitter for people who are even just sharing the BBC News article:
I think it’s obvious to anyone that we’re going to see these online bans fueling people who make business from selling people on conspiracy theories and fear (because now they can easily tell cynics to try and ask something about 5G and COVID19 on their own twitter page and they’ll see for themselves that their voice is being silenced) driving lots of off-line conversations and this is going to be huge for driving audiences from what will increasingly be seen to be tightly controlled government approved social media sites to encrypted websites that require the TOR browser etc and to Off-Line meetings and printed materials.
Thanks to the foolhardy Mobile operators perhaps we’re going to have to get to live in a society where random people will give you a nod and a wink about how silent microwaves are being used to selectively sterilise people…
Obviously there is 50+ years of history of computers being used to help take Patient histories but most medics are only learning about Patient History Taking questionnaires as a result of the COVID19 PanicDemic so I thought it might be interesting to review what’s being produced and upload videos here (as they’ll probably all disappear as quick as they appeared. Let me know if you’ve seen any I can trial and I’ll record a demo and upload it below:
Starting at 14.00 UK time (GMT) on Saturday 14th March this online Zoom discussion is scheduled to run for around 90 minutes and will include a number of initial short talks followed by a group discussion (in which all online attendees can participate) of the lessons that futurists can learn as individuals, nations and as a global community from the Covid-19 crisis.
Talks/Panelists will include:
“Taking a Mobile First approach to the management of Infectious Disease”
David Doherty, mHealth Insight
The acceleration of technology means that the near future may bring radical changes to all of us. Major developments in technologies like anti-aging, nanotech, genetics, computing, robotics, and geo-engineering are going to make the next few years very exciting – and possibly also very dangerous. We could gain god-like powers – but we might also lose sight of our humanity, and destroy everything that we used to hold dear.
What’s your view? Are things improving? Too slowly or too quickly? Are we are entering a new golden age? Or is the potential “Technological Singularity” something to fear? What does it mean to talk about “Human 2.0” and “Humanity+”? Or perhaps you view such talk as techno-hype? Maybe you just like the practical side of technology and want to find out more about possible paradigm shifts?
Anybody is welcome to this group – you don’t have to be a Techno Geek or work for some futuristic company to be in our group. The future applies to us all!
The European mHealth Hub is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the action “Establishing EU mHealth Hub including evidence for the integration of mHealth in the healthcare systems” (Grant Agreement No 737427) and is a project promoted by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and the World Health Organisation that has been developed by the Andalusian Agency for Healthcare Quality and has already attracted 19 partners including the CAMPANIA REGION, EHTEL (EUROPEAN HEALTH TELEMATICS ASSOCIATION), EMPIRICA GMBH, ERICSSON NIKOLA TESLA D.D., FOUNDATION TALLINN SCIENCE PARK TEHNOPOL – CONNECTED HEALTH CLUSTER, ESC (EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF CARDIOLOGY), DOM ZDRAVLJA ZAGREB – CENTAR (HEALTH CARE ZAGREB – CENTAR), HL7 INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION, I~HD (EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR INNOVATION THROUGH HEALTH DATA), MDOG (MIJN DATA ONZE GEZONDHEID), SPANISH MINISTRY OF HEALTH – MINISTERIO DE SALUD, OSAKIDETZA (BASQUE HEALTH SERVICE), PCHA (PERSONAL CONNECTED HEALTH ALLIANCE), PROMIS (PROGRAMMA MATTONE INTERNAZIONALE SALUTE), JÄMTLAND HÄRJEDALEN REGION, SPMS (SERVIÇOS PARTILHADOS DO MINISTÉRIO DA SAÚDE, SHARED SERVICES FOR MINISTRY OF HEALTH), UNIVERSITY OF AGDER, and the UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES TECHNIKUM WIEN.
If you’d like to check them out you can click the following links to read my reviews and guides to Mobile World Congress here: Reviews; 2008/2009/2010/2011/2014 Guides; 2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2019.
I attended the first Mobile World Congress (and even before that when it was the 3GSM Congress held in France) and have been advising the GSMA in various capacities over the years (helping organise meetings, select topics etc) so I thought it would be helpful to host a webinar on Monday 24 February 2020 to talk about the importance of mHealth to the Mobile Industry. The webinar will be live-streamed from a Hospital in Central London.
An interesting paper asking “What is the clinical value of mHealth for patients?” has been published in Nature by Simon P. Rowland (Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London), J. Edward Fitzgerald (KPMG International), Thomas Holme (Department of trauma and orthopaedic surgery, Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS) and Alison McGregor (Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford).
mHealth Insights
“Despite growing interest from both patients and healthcare providers, there is little clinical guidance on how mobile apps should be utilized to add value to patient care”
“We categorize apps according to their functionality (e.g. preventative behavior change,digital self-management of a specific condition, diagnostic) and discuss evidence for effectiveness from published systematicreviews and meta-analyses and the relevance to patient care”
This is a common misunderstanding that medics have about mHealth. It’s key to understand that basic features of mobile are often the most valuable apps used for mHealth. We don’t have to have Patients download apps to their smartphones before mHealth can totally transform care eg. it’s as easy as saying ‘here’s my number’.
It’s important to appreciate that because mobile first designed care is typically a lot more efficient and less expensive than the services it doesn’t benefit from being published in the same way that a new therapy or drug would (as these innovations come with new growth opportunities for the healthcare businesses eg. increased staffing and/or costs that they can pass onto payers like the government or insurance companies).
If you think mHealth apps aren’t getting adopted without evidence being published in clinical publications study the emergency call business. The entire Irish out of hour Doctor rota is organised using SMS for years. +99% of all calls have been made using mobile phones for 10+ years now in places like UK/USA/Ireland. Very little/anything can be found on pubmed but lots of work has been done behind the scenes by engineers. If they hadn’t figured out things like caller ID, location awareness, mobile phone design etc etc the services we see today would be completely unmanageable.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) defines mHealth as medical and public healthpractice supported by mobile devices”
“In total, 2.5 billion peopleworldwide own a mobile phone and there is huge potential for mHealth to facilitate unprecedented access to specialist clinicaldiagnostics and treatment advice. In the US 56% of physicians have discussed mHealth with patients and 26% have been asked about mHealth by a patient (PWC Provider Survey)”
I would doubt the value of a ‘Provider survey’ as most ‘providers’ still use fax machines. The vast majority (+99%) of Patients in the US have used their phone to call someone for medical advice or to look something up. Note: Facebook is very much a mHealth app.
“Despite growing interest from both patients and healthcare providers, there is little clinical guidance on how mHealth apps should be utilized to add value to patient care, where value might include improvements in speed and accuracy of diagnosis, personalized treatment regimes, behavioral change advice, patient education or improved access to established therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)”
It’s mostly about training. The Internet and Mobile has totally transformed education but the Universities have for the most part not yet realised:
“This article discusses the potential valueof mHealth apps for patients and the challenges that cliniciansface in discussing mHealth apps in clinic”
I see this is a major hurdle to the value of this paper. It’s focused on how mHealth apps can support the 2000 year old office visit model but the biggest opportunity is clearly for the newest mass media to take us beyond that model.
It’s like thinking a paper on how mobile will transform the post office will be interesting whereas the real opportunity lies in how mobile has transformed (and continues to transform) communication.
“Despite the citations of diagnostic mHealth appsthere is huge potential and evidence is starting to emerge todemonstrate clinically significant improvements in morbidity andmortality outcomes in specific scenarios”
RT @mHealthInsight: A Special Apple Event starts in 20mins. Expect #mHealth announcements as this is their first event since governments th… 1 week ago
RT @engagehealth: 👀 We're super excited to share our new look office. Introducing The Clubhouse, home of Engage Health Systems & @littlegre… 2 months ago
