ThreeDimensionalPeople Why don't you go outside and play with the three dimensional people?

mHealth is growing up

There's something rather resilient about the English language - it does a pretty good job of shrugging off silliness. I've noticed a decline in geek-inflicted bastardizations, such as adding 2.0 to anything (yes, guilty as charged) and removing vowels from company names. In today's post-crash world Twittr and Facebk would seem too flimsy.

So too, I predict the 'm' as in mHealth will soon go the way of the 'e' in ecommerce. Recently mHealth discussions have been shifting from the technology (doctors and patients using mobile phones and sensors) to what I think is the most important point - improving patients' service quality and reducing society's costs.

Two recent reports each make (at least) one important point. The first from Research2Guidance talks about the potential for cost savings for integrating mobile solutions, primarily due to better compliance (this graph reprinted by mobilemarketing watch, I don't have $2k to buy my own copy). Diabetes is the clear 'winner' here, and big pharma should be embracing this and driving the change to efficiency.

The second report mentioned in the article is the mHealth report from mobilestorm that provides a readable snapshot of the market and provides a useful summary of the different elements that make up mHealth today:

There are currently eight broad areas of the mHealth market, including general monitoring, personal emergency response systems (PERS), telemedicine, mobile medical equipment, RFID tracking, health and fitness software, mobile messaging and electronic medical records.

Moving on from narrow definitions of mhealth towards broad related categories is part of growing up. Before long the conversation will be less peppered with distracting and ill-fitting monikers, and be more about improving service quality and reducing costs, with technology just as assumed, ubiquitous and invisible as oxygen in the air. Or homeless dudes in San Francisco.