Panel: mHealth Coming to Life

Azita Arvani, principal of the business consulting firm Arvani Group, said a recent Price Waterhouse survey showed most Americans like the idea of having access to remote healthcare and that about 40 percent would pay to have a mobile monitoring device that would communicate with their physician.

If there is this level of interest from both consumers and providers, Arvani asked the panel, what is holding mHealth back? The panelists included Alex Brisbourne, president and COO of KORE Telematics; Eleanor Chye, executive director of AT&T's mHealth unit; Vivian Funkhouser, head of global healthcare solutions for Motorola Enterprise Mobility Solutions; Clint McClellan, senior director of business development for Qualcomm's Health & Life Sciences unit, and Jim Pursley, general manager of sales and marketing for GE Healthcare's Aging Services.

The panelists agreed that government mandates for electronic medical records plays in favor of mHealth, but several also said a business model needs to be developed. Arvani said there also are liability and security concerns, questions about interoperability among hardware and software, and providing support for services.

Brisbourne said KORE's healthcare business using the company's machine-to-machine technology has started taking off. Mobile healthcare represented just 1 percent of new business in 2008 and is expected to rise to 23 percent this year, he said.

Business opportunity

Chye said mobile health care is important to AT&T not just as a business opportunity but also for the well-being of its employees, retirees and dependants. AT&T looks at mobile healthcare for its ability to provide value, she said, and not as a cost center.

The technology and devices already exist to enable mHealth, McClellan said, adding that basic phones and health monitors can be used now. "It is really about putting the pieces together," he said.

Separate interview

In a separate interview, Funkhouser also talked about how mobile devices in hospitals can save time for providers. Hospital nurses, she said, can cut in half the distance they walk during a shift, as well as the time they are tethered to a wired phone simply by using a wireless handset.

This travel, much of which is unproductive, can be reduced significantly with a handset using VoIP over WLAN, such as the new Motorola MC75. The handset runs the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.