Language is arguably the greatest contributor to civilization, and yet it all too often struggles to convey the common understanding of an emerging terminology like mHealth. At its simplest level, mHealth could be described as the use of mobile and related technologies in the application of healthcare solutions and services. Related technologies might refer to information and communications, but the area I would like to focus on is mobility, by which I mean the need to connect with patients more seamlessly and dynamically.
To understand this, first look at the pharmaceutical industry’s emerging understanding and application of mHealth. In this industry, where drug products take a number of years to work their way through the stages of research and development, patient engagement has often been thought of within the constraints of clinical trials only. However, it is now commonplace to have development and commercial resources working more collaboratively within therapeutic teams, bringing a mix of both pre- and post-market objectives. The result of this is that post-market mHealth strategies are being considered during drug development and certain aspects of post-market mHealth solutions are being considered to better support patients during clinical trials.
This is leading to a realization that an mHealth strategy is perhaps more of a continuum from clinical trials through to post-market than was previously perceived. In fact, as clinical trials look to capture data more comprehensively and use patients’ own mobile devices and technology (BYOD), we find that patient engagement in clinical trials and post-market mHealth patient solutions have a number of goals in common. This will. In turn, drive the industry’s ability to deliver progressive, scalable products across a broad drug portfolio.
Of course to do this successfully, we need to be able to connect effectively with patients, which brings me back to the ‘m’ in mHealth. A week rarely passes by without seeing yet more statistics of increasing mobile and Internet access globally. Unfortunately, when we consider the extent of that access for specific populations in specific territories, some throw their hands up, announcing that device segmentation or ubiquitous access prevents us from truly delivering services comprehensively and at scale. I find this kind of commentary particularly frustrating, as technology itself is not the barrier but the enabler if applied appropriately.
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At Exco InTouch we use technology that allows us to securely identify the specifics of a patient’s device or access technology and serve them up with a suitable product. This could mean base-level text messaging only by phone, through to a browser-based feature phone, smartphone, tablet or simply a browser. Now it may well be the case that we can’t directly reach 100 percent of a particular patient population, but we need to remember the size of the challenges healthcare is dealing with, and an 80:20 approach is not only good enough but very pragmatic as we move to get these services established. We should also not discount the ability to still provision a percentage of devices to patients. This may well not be sustainable long-term, but again, can serve as a very effective strategy to getting things off the ground.
Date: March 21, 2014