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.

It must be true because it says so in a press release. This one in fact, from the folks at United Healthcare. Who knows, but still a nice data point:

The University of Texas Medical Branch estimates that widespread implementation of telemedicine, for example, could save the U.S. health system more than $4 billion annually, and improve health outcomes for millions.

Good use case in the Washington Post for mobiles as a way to speed up diagnosis and accelerate treatment. 

Physicians use photos from patients' cellphones to deliver 'mobile health'

The other day I got hit on the head by a big chunk of timber in a garage - and having the ability to send a picture of the wound to the 911 operator who asked me to describe the cut ("I don't know, it's on the top of my head")  would make sense. 

It seems to be pretty accurate:

"The initial data is encouraging," Sikka said. The study will continue through October, but so far, he says, about 90 percent of diagnoses are accurate. Sikka said camera phones with at least three megapixels, autoflash and autofocus work well.

Sometimes, however, the picture quality is poor or the patient information is not specific enough. Fifty percent of the cases where the doctor did not make an accurate diagnosis involved images that Sikka said were too grainy.

So, when high quality cameras become ubiquitous, look for accuracy rates for remote diagnoses to get up towards 95% - pretty good considering the alternative. 

The WSJ reports on some fascinating new wireless apps that both improve patient care and lower costs. An industry report talks about annual savings from remote monitoring at "$10.1 billion for U.S. sufferers of congestive heart failure, $6.1 billion for diabetes and $4.9 billion for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease." Partly based on this promise, there was more VC investment in venture health-care in Q1 ($2.23bn) than tech companies ($1.88) - the first time this has happened.

Related to this, Mobihealth calls out the opportunity for better medicine management.

A new report conducted by the New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) found that not taking medications as prescribed leads to poorer health, more frequent hospitalization, a higher risk of death and as much as $290 billion annually in increased medical costs. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of patients in the U.S. do not take their medications as instructed.

I suspect this number dramatically overstates reality, based on the breahtless overprescription of medicines and procedures in this country, and the fact that the drugs people forget to take are most probably the ones that are not helping them get better. But anyway, even if the number was one third of that, that's still an opportunity worth sharpening a pencil for.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I immediately think of text-based and mobile applications to do this. However, Mobihealth points to a next generation pill made by Proteus that contains a chip made of food (sic) that transmits info to the doctors by a pill ("Ouch, I was eaten at 12pm", "Ooh, this guy's colon is pretty messy").  It's facing regulatory hurdles currently, but as long as they can make the "it's food products, it's safe" idea at the top of mind, and get costs down below a penny a pill, this could be big. (The fact that the CEO is also a Brit transplant to US and studied at my university in the UK gives me extra cause for optimism.)

These type of Magic Pills will compliment not substitute the phone as the personal health solution. Once the data on pill consumption and their internal investigations has been surfaced, it will be trivial to create really interesting and useful consumer-targeted web and mobile applications that provide helpful pointers to the patient to keep them fit, and take some of the low-level grunt work away from doctors.

Went along last night to the well attended Health2.0 meetup, organized by Eugene Borukhovich. A capacity crowd - I thought there might be a danger of overcrowding and asphyxiation but relaxed when I remembered about 95% of the people in the room were MDs.

Two impressive presentations which go to show why mHealth is such an interesting space. The first was by Rick(?) Tedescu from Handhold Adaptive. It's a technology company making solutions for people who are, as their tagline reads, "differently enabled". Powerful story of a guy being motivated to create a solution to improve the life of his family and his son, Evan - who has autism. Their first product, iPrompts provides visual icons on the iPhone linked to words to make it easier for developmentally challenged people to interact. They're selling this on the App Store for $50. Lots of development plans there. My concern was whether the Apple rights management system was secure enough to prevent piracy of such a high value app.

Second up was a very smooth - apart from the technical glitches - presentation by Healogica, who make it easy for people with illnesses to find and register for relevant clinical trials. The founders Jean Luc and Jeff are MDs who have come fresh from heading the healthcare practice at Gerson Lehrman, and have raised 750k in angel funding in April this year, having self funded it for a year. Very polished performance and technology that seems to solve an identifiable problem for a certain group of people (the size of which is obviously the key question). They have an iPhone app whose revenues will be 100% given to research Pancreatic cancer research (Steve Jobs' disease, a savvy but well meant marketing touch).

Looking forward to more of these events, congrats Eugene.