New Vodafone report on mHealth

Vodafone has just released a report on mHealth as part of its Health Debate. The report explores ways in which mHealth has succeeded, and ways that barriers to adoption by users still remain. Despite the considerable interest and coverage in the space, many of the solutions are still at the small scale. Fordcastle was asked to be part of the team, and we wrote about mHealth services in developed countries, and some common factors for success.

As input, I interviewed a number of CEOs of mHealth companies to get their perspectives, including Voxiva, Well Doc, Great Call, iTriage, AirStrip, Microsoft and RunKeeper. It was interesting to see that most mHealth companies are still rather small, as they tend to draw from a number of disciplines. Interestingly, many of the succesful models (such as Text4Health) have been inspired by examples from developing countries. 

Also, it's worth pointing out that mHealth as a concept is hard to pin down, and as Todd Park, HHS CTO said this morning at the Startup Heallth event, probably not going to be around in 5 years. While there were some SMS-only solutions, most are online and mobile - platform independent. Vodafone gets this, and are doing a good job in my experience, of facilitating the debate about where things are going, and not pushing us in any particular direction. 

We discovered 8 factors that are often found in the leading mhealth companies, and grouped them into three categories:

Adoption (Simplicity, Empathetic Design, Comprehensiveness)

Engagement (Interactive, Customer Delight)

Impact (User Value, Joined-up solutions, Clinical and economic results) 

The abundant discussion and interest in mHealth at the moment is at fever pitch, and entrepreneurs and investors are pouring into the space. This is very positive, as it's only a matter of time before this bubbling cauldron cooks up some interesting breakthroughs, enabled by an administration that is showing serious signs of innovation. Our Vodafone team will be be presenting and discussing the paper at the mHealth Summit in Washington, so we'd welcome feedback and contributions to the ongoing debate, online (a LinkedIn group has been created) or in person.

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[Harvey Hugh]

The Vodafone Health Debate is a series of events around the world looking at the topicalities and implications of implementing new network and mobile technologies in healthcare