Game On for the Fearless Wireless Frontier

I’m at the Mobile Health Summit in Washington, DC, that hosts such luminaries as Bill Gates, Ted Turner and top government officials. Of particular interest to HIMSS Business-Centered Systems is the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement around applying medical banking principles in the wireless setting.

Session titles tell the story: “The Transformational Power of Mobile Money and Its Intersection with Mobile Health,” “The Business and Economics of mHealth,” “Case Studies of the Convergence Between Mobile Money and Mobile Health,” and “What Does the Future Hold?”…and others.

Medical banking has taken hold on many levels. From operating rules development under the Affordable Care Act to integration models with Health Record Banking, specialized payment platforms – a race in the making and now mHealth and mPayments convergence.

The power of the idea continues to evolve and support exciting new innovations. It’s amazing to see the line up of sponsors here – Skype, Verizon, AT&T, 3G Doctor, CardioNet, American Telemedicine Association and many more. The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and the UN Foundation, are presenting this event. Clearly, this area promises to expand into a new discipline that will find many healthcare information technologies going mobile.

As data is liberated into the airwaves, the key issues will be:

• privacy and security,
• adaptation of treatment modalities,
• health plan reimbursement policies that can fuel or stymie growth, and 
• the power of the consumer for steering medical innovation by paying out of pocket (whether direct or via donors as is in paying for healthcare for Haitian victims after the earthquake).

An interesting issue will be, of course, how far mobile technologies can reach into the farthest estuaries, mountains and valleys of the earth to equip healthcare providers with tools that can meaningfully improve health and healthcare for the diverse people groups that share our world.

As these dynamics work themselves out in the marketplace, there will be concomitant pressure on business models. The technologies, in some cases, will completely revolutionize the modalities as scale comes into play. Imagine that previously unheard of treatment options in the most remote areas of our planet could be supported.

Just as surely as the mobile revolution rushes into this vacuum, the need for money management will follow. The convergence of mHealth and mBanking is just as inevitable as other medical banking models that are manifesting in the US. Technologies and money management will move full steam ahead while policy tries to keep up. The use of global frameworks for privacy and security, data transfer, and other standards will more likely than not become the norm.

I look forward to sharing insights gained while here as we look at the ‘bleeding edge’ of the medical banking movement. Until next post…