"Mobile health by definition will become a necessary component of all healthcare," Microsoft's Director of Development for Consumer Health Solutions Oren Rosenbloom said last week at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Mobility Research Center (MRC) in Silicon Valley. "Technology has created the expectation that you can take your office with you where ever you go and you can communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. Increasingly family health managers interact with their pediatricians, their personal doctors, and the health and wellness providers of their aging and often remote parents via secure/insecure email and cell phones."
Rosenbloom said the most immediate questions mHealth pilots need to answer are:
Can we empower patients/consumers to take an important role in managing their chronic disease ?
Will patient outcomes improve with better data integrity and compliance?
Can clinician efficiency improve by having more reliable and up-to-date data?
Can we improve the quality of a patient visit and reduce the length of appointment time with more integrated physician and patient involvement in disease treatment?
Can we reduce cost by using "off the shelf" home medical devices and leveraging patient's existing home computer and Internet connection?
mHealth lessons learned so far, according to Rosenbloom:
Patient age factors into success
Installing software and devices varies across configurations
Device industrial design is greatly lacking
Data integrity even controlled by patient is an issue
Mobile health and technology is still in its infancy
Business models are still insufficient
There are lots of information systems "data islands"
There is increasing desire for patient involvement
There is no substitute for human interaction
Do you agree with Rosenbloom's challenges and lessons learned? Are your pilots facing similiar issues? Do your solutions solve these issues? Feel free to comment below or write me at brian.dolan@mobihealthnews.com.
To read more about Rosenbloom's presentation and get access to his actual slides, visit the CyLab CyBlog here.
