Do We Need A Health Platform?

As I consider all of the different health platforms that are being built by mobile health companies, I can’t help but wonder if we need a health specific platform. Let me make the case for a minute that we don’t need one.

We already have plenty of platforms that we’re using already. Facebook and Twitter readily come to mind. LinkedIn is another interesting platform that most of us are on. Plus, while I’m sure that some don’t consider it a platform, I don’t know a single person online that doesn’t have an email address. In fact, I think I’d have to dig into some of my nursing home visits to think of someone I know who doesn’t have an email address they use regularly (although, many of those in nursing homes have emails as well).

Do we really need a separate health platform beyond those that are already free and publicly available today?

I’m sure that people’s first gut reaction will be around the security and privacy concerns associated with the platforms mentioned above. Certainly there’s a strong case to be made for this. I recently saw a report that said that your credit score could be effected based on how many of your Facebook friends have bad credit scores. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how health insurance companies could use your data on these public platforms to influence your premium.

Certainly there are some concerns there, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping a whole generation of people who share their health information just the same. It’s possible that this will catch up with them and they’ll want a more private place to discuss their health, but I don’t see this happening soon.

I’ve also been intrigued by chronic patients approach to the privacy of their health information. They’ll share anything and everything with anyone who could lead them to an improvement to their chronic condition. The concept of privacy doesn’t mean much when you’re dying.

This still leaves everyone in the middle. I know I’m careful about what health information I share online. More than once I’ve gone to my wife and asked her if she really wanted to share that information with the world. It’s hard to balance the benefits of sharing with the unknown.

Certainly I haven’t made a very strong case for the current platforms. They still have some major weaknesses. I have no doubt that we’ll have health built into current platforms and dedicated healthcare platforms. If you’re an entrepreneur I just think you have to be aware that whatever your building might get beaten by what’s already out there.

Post a Comment(0)
August 30, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:Health Platforms  Health Privacy  Health Security

Which Type of Cell Phone Do You Use?

Today my sister was evaluating the various types of cell phones out there. I told her a couple of options that she couldn’t go wrong with, but it prompted me to wonder which types of cell phones readers of this site use. Sure, I could look at the stats for the website, but that would just be people who read the site on their cell phone. No doubt many read it from tablets, desktops, laptops, emails, and feed readers.

I look forward to seeing the results.

Post a Comment(0)
August 28, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Android  Apple  Blackberry  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Windows Phone
Tags:  

The Categories of mHealth

mHealth (or mobile health if you prefer) is such a broad area. Not only can it include every aspect of healthcare, but it also has no geographic, economic, or cultural barriers. You might remember that I wrote previously about various categories of mobile health apps. I think there are also 3 categories of mHealth communities. While there is some overlap, I think it’s interesting to look at each communities unique assets.

Smart Phone User, Developed Country – This category of mHealth user has a smart phone and almost always has internet access. If they don’t have their smart phone, they’re in front of a laptop or computer, they’re holding a tablet, they’re always on and always connected. Internet access and electricity are generally not a problem.

Non-Smart Phone User, Developed Country – This group is quickly becoming smaller and smaller as smart phone’s become cheaper. Plus, it’s amazing how many people who can barely put food on the table have an iPhone in the pocket. However, this group also contains many of the older generation who don’t have a smart phone (my mom’s in this group). Both of these groups are really important parts of the healthcare system. However, for some reason many of the mHealth applications that are made don’t consider them.

Cell Phone User, Underdeveloped Country – We’ve all seen the statistic that shows that there are more people in the world with cell phones than there are people who have clean drinking water. These users have a cell phone, but these are generally feature phones and not smart phones. In some cases they might not have a place to charge the phone regularly and the service they get might be spotty. There are a lot of amazing mHealth applications being built for these communities. I’m always amazed at the power of a text message.

I’m sure we could divide these categories in a lot of different ways. Certainly there are plenty of exceptions to these categories as well, but I think it’s valuable to consider which type of user an mHealth application is trying to help. It makes all the difference when developing your mobile health application.

Post a Comment(0)
August 27, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Tablets
Tags:    

Addictive mHealth Apps

I first fell in love with the Center for Connected Health when I attended their Connected Health Sympoisum a few years back. The organization is run by Joseph Kvedar who is one of my favorite thought leaders when it comes to mobile health. He’s optimistic, but pragmatic in his approach to mobile health. Plus, he’s not afraid to be transparent in his thoughts and approach to using technology to improve health. A great example of this was his recent blog post titled “Could Mobile Health Become Addictive?”

The answer to his question is yes, but there’s so much more to the article. I particularly love his changing view of the value of mobile health applications versus something like a simple text message. No doubt there has been some “irrational exuberance” around mobile health applications. While the energy has no doubt outpaced the results, that shouldn’t discount the potential of mobile health applications.

Joseph Kvedar points out in his article that “those of us who own smart phones check them obsessively (by some counts 150 times/day).” No doubt many cell phone users are addicted to their cell phones. I’m not sure all the neuro chemical responses that we get from cell phone usage, but I’ve felt the endorphins kick in when you have a new message on your cell phone. This addiction probably also explains phantom vibration or phantom ringing.

The real question is how can we apply this type of addictive response to healthcare apps? Plus, how can we make sure that it becomes a healthy addiction. We’ve all heard of the person who’s too addicted to fitness or too addicted to self monitoring that it becomes unhealthy. There’s definitely a balance, but I’m sure that the day will come that mobile health apps are as addictive as a text message. I’ve started to see glimpses of it in the current mobile health offerings, but we’re not there on a widespread scale yet.

What mobile health applications or types of applications do you see that are headed down this path?

Post a Comment(1)
August 26, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:        

Does Wellness Just Shift Costs as Opposed to Reduce Costs?

Whenever the discussions of healthcare costs come up, you always hear people saying that the reason healthcare costs are so high is because we have a sick care system as opposed to a healthcare system. If we’d just focus our efforts on promoting wellness, we could lower the costs of healthcare dramatically.

I’ve long been interested in the idea of wellness lowering costs. On face, the idea seems to have merits. If I’m on a wellness program and avoid a sickness, then I won’t have to use our healthcare system to treat that sickness. However, I’ve always wondered if all that wellness programs do is shift costs as opposed to reducing costs on the macro level. In the case described, maybe my wellness program just delayed the sickness by 5 years as opposed to making sure it never happens again. This would mean it was just a 5 year cost shift as opposed to a permanent savings.

I’ll admit that this is just a concept that I’m considering. I’m happy to be proven otherwise.

For example, if a wellness program helps people avoid something like obesity, then it’s possible that we could permanently avoid a whole variety of sicknesses and diseases that are caused by obesity. Considering the discount insurance providers give non-smokers, my guess is that something similar could be applied to smoking.

I imagine if we researched this in depth we’d find a mixed basket of results. In many cases I think wellness programs do just time shift the healthcare costs. However, if you attack the right wellness issues, then you could permanently avoid healthcare costs for specific diseases.

Has anyone done or know of research on this? Which wellness issues can really help reduce healthcare costs permanently? If we knew this, maybe we could focus much of our mobile health efforts.

Post a Comment(0)
August 23, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT
Tags:  Wellness Programs

10 Steps to Mobile Health App Monetization

Margalit Gur-Arie has a interesting post over on HIT Consultant that discusses 10 steps to monetizing your mobile health application. Here are the 10 steps she offers:

  1. The Cloud
  2. Open Standards
  3. Data Completeness
  4. Data Validation
  5. Open Architecture
  6. Personalization
  7. Usability
  8. Mobility
  9. Gamification
  10. Taste Your Own Dog Food

In some ways I think this list is too complex. Plus, I’m not sure you need all of these things to have a successful mobile health app. My advice is to create a mobile health app that provides real value to whoever uses it. If you provide value to the end user, then they’ll keep using it. Plus, if they are finding value they’ll share it with those around them.

When it comes to monetization, that’s quite easy if you have someone who finds value in your app.

Post a Comment(0)
August 21, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:HIT Consultant  Margalit Gur-Arie  mHealth Monetization  Mobile Health App Monetization  Mobile Health Cloud

BBC Documentary – Monitor Me

The BBC has worked with Dr. Kevin Fong to put together a documentary on the mHealth monitoring trend and its impact on our lives. As he says at the beginning of the documentary, “I want to find out whether simply monitoring ourselves everyday and gathering new information about our bodies could be the key to living a longer, healthier life.”

I haven’t yet had an hour to watch the documentary, but I’ve added it to my YouTube watch later since it looks quite interesting. I’ve embedded the documentary below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Post a Comment(0)
August 19, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
Tags:        

This week I spent a lot of time at the SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas. While at the conference I had the chance to meet and talk with Kyle Samani, founder of Pristine, where we discussed Pristine’s work in bringing Google Glass to healthcare. He’s particularly focused on bringing Google Glass to healthcare, but I have little doubt that Google Glass will be valuable to many parts of healthcare (I’m sure Kyle would agree).

I recently read about a new Google Glass incubator on . Here’s a short quote from the article:

“We are going to see a revolution going forward of wearable computational devices, with Google Glass being the first one out of the gate,” says Chief Innovation Officer of Palomar Health, Orlando Portale.

This prediction is the reason Palomar Health and Qualcomm Life have teamed up to build an incubator for developers called Glassomics.

The incubator aims to provide platforms and eventually, hospital venues to create medical apps for computer glasses, smart watches, and wearable devices for patients.

Qualcomm has been a big player in the mobile health space for a while, so it’s no surprise to see them following the mobile health trend into Google Glass. I think it’s interesting they are calling it Glassnomics when it seems the incubator has a much larger focus than glass into all wearable devices.

I’m still not completely sold on Google Glass in particular, but I have little doubt that it has made a whole new category of tech product main stream. We’ll see if Google Glass becomes the dominant platform or if a startup company comes along and makes a better version. Either way, I’m excited at the potential of Google Glass in healthcare.

(0)
August 16, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
Tags:      Orlando Porale  Palomar Health      Qualcomm Life  Wearable Incubator

FitBit Raises $43 Million

This is great news for FitBit the company. That should be enough cash to really aggressively go after the mobile health market. Of course, with $43 million of funding and their previous $12 million third round of funding, they have no choice but to hit it out of the park now.

One advantage that FitBit has over a lot of the mobile health industry is that the FitBit is now sold in 15,000 retail locations across the US. Getting that type of distribution takes time and is a very strong asset for the company.

I’ll be interested to see where they take the technology next. One problem with being a hardware company is that your next model has to be better than your previous model. I’ll be interested to see how well they can execute their next FitBit models. Will they continue to make huge step forwards in mobile health devices or will they be just an evolution of their current product? The answer to that will determine whether FitBit is a great investment or not.

My question for you is: Does this amount of funding help to legitimize the mobile health space?

Post a Comment(0)
August 15, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Gadgets  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:      

mHealth Tracking – Tooth Sensor

We’ve written about all sorts of health sensors, but until today we’ve never written about a newly created tooth sensor. Here’s an excerpt from Medical Daily on the new tooth sensor technology:

The new sensor, which was developed by scientists at National Taiwan University, uses Wi-Fi to sync with a person’s smartphone and keep a daily record of the wearer’s eating and drinking habits, along with smoking, coughing, and speaking. At less than a centimeter long, the sensor relies on “unique teeth motions” to differentiate each activity.

The wireless sensor would sit between two teeth and be held in place with glue

I’ve heard people refer to the human body as the ultimate sensor. It’s amazing to consider all of the ways we can monitor and track various elements of the human body. I have a hard time seeing the tooth sensor going mainstream. People are pretty particular about what they put in their mouths. However, for certain situations I could see it happening.

I think the final implementation might be like a mini retainer in your mouth. Many people have had retainers in their mouth for years and years. It seems like something similar could be put in your mouth as a tracker. However, the retainer might not have to be for the full mouth. It could just be on one tooth.

We’re at the very start of the sensor journey.

Post a Comment(0)
August 13, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
Tags:Mouth Sensor  National Taiwan University  Tooth Sensor


  • Next