Reflections on the mHealth Summit
Monday, December 19, 2011
| Rob Havasy
About the Author: Rob Havasy is a Project Specialist at the Center for Connected Health.
I had the privilege of attending the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC for all three years that it has been held. The growth in attendees has been truly exponential, doubling by my rough estimation each year. In this way it has been a symbol of the growth of mHealth itself, and the conference surely reflects the state of the mHealth ecosystem.
As I look back, I’d characterize the three years thus:
- 2009: Finding our feet. We gathered in DC and the bulk of the discussion sought to clarify what mHealth was, who was involved, what technologies were available, and where we were going.
- 2010: Promise and potential. Last year the discussion was about lofty goals and unlimited potential. There was an underlying pessimism though, not just because the country was locked in recession and healthcare reform was still fresh on people’s minds, but because very little evidence was available that mHealth interventions were effective and implementable in the real world. Overall though, people had graduated from wondering what mHealth was to envisioning the problems it can solve.
- 2011: Blood in the water. This year, big vendors began to realize something was happening with this new field and they wanted in. The tone of the conference changed and became more commercial. Keynote speeches featured fewer foundations and more companies. 2010 gave us keynotes by the Gates Foundation, the UN Foundation, Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. 2011 gave us keynotes from HHS, the Federal Communications Commission, Apollo Hospitals, and West Wireless, but also Johnson & Johnson, Verizon Wireless, Qualcomm, Intel, and CTIS.
In many ways the changing tone of the conference reflects the progress that mHealth has made: many more people are listening and believing in the potential now. But back in 2010, people began to wonder if mHealth was approaching the “peak of inflated expectations” of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. Given the sudden influx of corporate interest, I’d say we haven’t yet reached the peak; but I’d bet we are close.
In that blog post, Jonathan Linkous wrote the most important advice I’ve yet read for new (or even established) companies entering this market. He said, “To be successful, mHealth devices and services have to understand how the healthcare market operates; how it is funded and regulated; and, most important, how buying decisions are made.”
These questions still haven’t been discussed in depth by the industry, and the people I spoke with at this year’s Summit were still unclear on the answers. Many cool ideas were shown, and new devices launched. But still no successful programs on a large scale, at least in the United States (the jury is still out on Text for Baby).
Here at the Center we continue to employ our successful methodology for developing programs that provide lasting value. Our text message program for pregnant teens continues to expand, serving the original community health center in Lynn, MA and now two additional community health centers in Boston. Our diabetes and blood pressure home monitoring programs have incorporated a wireless data transmission device from MedApps, giving our patients a mobile connectivity option if they need it. And we are hard at work on a clinical trial supported by the McKesson Foundation to collect evidence demonstrating that simple text messages, personalized for the patient, can increase the effectiveness of our already successful diabetes self management programs. Future enhancements to the activity program that we created for the Boston Public Schools will include a text message component for older children, thanks to a grant from the Verizon Foundation.
Each of these programs demonstrates that mHealth technologies can be deployed in the real world if the right combination of products, systems, and resources is brought together. The answers to Jonathan Linkous’ questions are out there, beginning with our own observation that, “Technology is not the intervention.” Perhaps, once we cross the peak and drop into the “trough of disillusionment” a quieter, simpler environment will allow us to finally concentrate on finding these answers, rather than on just hyping the potential of mHealth.