Gaining Perspectives on mHealth

In my recent blog post summarizing December’s mHealth Summit, I began by saying that the mHealth organizers must have been pleased with the conference, given its growth in attendance and engagement.

We were equally pleased with RWJF and Pioneer’s presence at the meeting – in fact, I’d say the meeting was a resounding success from our perspective.

Pioneer grantees Ben Sawyer and Debra Lieberman were both on panels featuring their work in health games and mobile technology. Deborah Estrin and Ida Sim announced the launch of Open mHealth, which is supported with funding from RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio. And a session focused on this summer's mHealth Evidence meeting that was conceived of and co-sponsored by Pioneer.

Our Public Health Portfolio was also there looking for interesting perspectives on how mHealth could be deployed by public health departments to address a variety of health issues.

And finally, I was lucky enough to moderate a special session on a topic of keen interest to me and the portfolio.

“What I Really Need from mHealth: Five Perspectives on Value” featured a great cast of panelists including Robert Jarrin, senior director of Government Affairs for Qualcomm; Carol McCall, chief strategy officer at GNS Healthcare; Anmol Madan, founder of Ginger.io and visiting researcher at MIT Media Lab; and Richard Katz, director of cardiology at George Washington University Hospital.

Our session was structured around an imaginary mobile health application. The panelists discussed the value  of the application and how to demonstrate that value from the point of view of the individual, provider, various payers, regulators and researchers. This generated a fascinating conversation in which participants spoke from both a professional and personal perspective. Toward the end, we opened the discussion up to the attendees, which led to an informative and engaging discussion that will hopefully extend far beyond the session. The various perspectives are not completely aligned but yield something quite important when they do come together.

But wait, as they say on TV, there’s more! In addition to our panelists, we brought together about a dozen thought leaders, including representatives from organizations like NIH, Google, GNS Healthcare and the National Science Foundation, for a series of lively discussions about the future of mHealth and how to build value for all the players in the ecosystem. There was no lack of good ideas or strongly held opinions, and more questions were raised than answers offered. However, at the end of the night, we could all see light at the end of the tunnel. And that light came from a greater understanding of the value others saw in mHealth. From this newly fashioned broader vision, I’m hopeful we all left with a better sense of the way forward and with new ideas on how we could each play a role. 

I look forward to sharing more of what we learned and what this might mean for our investments in mHealth moving forward – and hearing your thoughts as well.

Comments

[Brian Baum]

Al, as a participant in the RWJF discussion group I came away quite hopeful and encouraged. Organizations like RWJF are essential to fulfilling the potential of “mHealth”, or perhaps “Health” innovation in general.

Unlike almost every other industry in our economy where an innovation, a great idea, a new “app” a new mobile device can spring up, take hold and change the world, health care is burdened by a multitude of natural and unnatural barriers to innovation. From the localized nature of health care delivery, to the sometimes competing interests of stakeholders, to the disconnect between value delivered and price paid, to the intensity of regulation – all these factors and many more challenge the success of innovation in health care.

“m” has fundamentally changed our society – globally. I don’t think anyone could or would challenge that reality. The potential to radically change health care is palpable. However,some grounding and a healthy dose of balance is required.

Balance – in that we cannot stifle innovation. There is simply too much to be done, too much legacy, too many people in the industry that look through the lens of health care history. Health care is not likely to be “innovated” from the inside out. We need the outsiders, the innovators, the dreamers to take innovative technologies like mobile and apply them in ways that will drive change, improve lives, improve health and outcomes and drive efficiency and cost reductions. With that said, we do need to balance pure innovation with the realities of our health care delivery system. Unlike other industries, health care deals with lives and requires evidence. We need to foster an open community that encourages innovation, finds the apps, the devices, the process changes that show promise and then look to integrate them into the realities of health care delivery.

Grounding – health apps likely will not succeed in isolation. “There’s an app for that”, does not hold the same literal meaning and implication it does in other industries. It is not “m” and everything else, it is “m” within the context of other solutions and systems. Will 312,000,000 consumers put an app on their mobile device to monitor their health? Roughly 80% of these people think they are healthy and rarely think about their health, so the answer – probably not. Should the vast majority of people more routinely monitor their health, and become aware of changes in their health trends that may warrant clinical attention – probably. Bottom line, there is no one absolute solution. “m” will dramatically impact care delivery. But to truly impact the diversity of health consumers, it must be an element of a total consumer “surround” - a new way of enabling consumers to be proactive in monitoring their health. The collective “we” – public/private industry participants need to innovate care and make it a consumer experience. As the late Steve Jobs observed relative to market research “it is not the consumers job to know what they want”. That philosophy could be no more relevant than it is in health care. It is a service that the vast majority of consumers do not appreciate, if they believe they are healthy, have little interest in, believe they should pay nothing for it and if they truly need it, expect it to be at their disposal with the most costly state of the art medical intervention known to man immediately available to them.
We need the innovators. We need the best and brightest and we need to encourage them. But we also have to support their assimilation into health care.

This is what excites me in what I heard at the discussion that the RWJF sponsored. There is a unique need in health care for someone/an organization to broker the health innovator with the health community. Whether the application is pure “m” and alternate technology/delivery channel or a hybrid, RWJF has the opportunity to serve as a facilitator – encouraging unabashed innovation and as positive innovation emerges support the innovators integration into the realities and requirements of the health care industry. I believe this need is essential to accelerating innovation across the board and bringing the value of technologies like mobile to the urgent needs of our health care system.

I look forward to following the progress and participating in this path with the RWJF.

Brian Baum, Founder and CEO vitaTrackr

[Thomp Bill]

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