Corp May/June 2012 : Page 31HEALTH CARE struggle to get a foothold in the emerging mHealth industry. Consumer apps on iTunes and Android Market remain proliferous, according to the California Health Care Foundation, and more than 73 percent of these are intended for con-sumers and patients. Despite the number of apps, bigger dollars are being spent in the B2B and B2P (business-to-patient) world. These applications are distributed via enterprise servers and not available on iTunes.” Logic Solutions’ first product in mHealth was an app that allowed sur-geons to consult with specialists through encrypted real-time streaming video on a smartphone or tablet during surgery. Since then, sales have doubled yearly. “In late 2011 and 2012, business shows a trend toward patient measure-ment, mobile medical records and telemedicine,” Zeffer said. “Because things are moving so fast there’s a lack of standards, which can be frustrating. We see this as a growing vertical oppor-tunity for our business. “Between the recession and slump in automotive, Michigan was hurt bad,” Zeffer continued. “The silver lining is that the Midwest is flush with inventors. Creative people always figure a way out. Combine an entrepreneurial spirit with creativity and mobile technology and Michigan will move the needle on Mobile Health.” Getting records to doctors, patients “The Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) is making sure that patient information is available to physicians and to patients on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets,” said Dr. David Allard, Henry Ford’s Health System’s chief medical information officer and a family-medicine practitioner. “We start-ed working on electronic medical records (EMR) on our own in the 1980’s. Today, they are vendor based. Our goal is to have an electronic record for each patient in our five hospitals so that the information is available to our 1,200 doctors, and patients can use their record as a tool for monitoring their health.” Making certain the hospital retained the privacy of patients’ records was a major barrier to consolidating the elec-tronic patient records. “Today we are working on ways to make these records more readily accessi-ble to physicians on their smartphones and to patients,” Allard said. “For instance, if a patient has allergies and is given a new prescription, both she and her physician rely on mobile software to find out if the new medication will inter-act with her current meds.” One concern regarding transferring information to mobile devices is the dif-ficulty reading the information because the screen is small or the phone isn’t set up to format the information correctly. “To make mobile medical technology work we needed to put together a secure wireless infrastructure to support the data and software,” Allard said. “We also require physicians to install security software on their devices.” Allard reports that the HFHS is using mobile monitoring devices with patients within the hospital such as in Intensive Care Units and outside the hospital for monitoring blood pressure and sugar levels. HFHS also cares for patients remotely, working around their work schedule and making the information available in multiple hospitals. “We found that embracing mobile technology results in a better job of pre-venting duplicate testing,” Allard said. “Our billing system has also become more accurate.” The U.S. Institute of Medicine esti-mates that up to 100,000 patients die annually as a result of hospital errors. The Detroit Medical Center (DMC) has achieved improvements in patient safety and quality of care while saving money – $5 million in costs in 2009 – thanks to efficiencies created by its electronic record system, which manages nearly all of the DMC’s patient health information, according to Ruth Kremer, marketing and public relations director for Detroit Receiving Hospital. “At the DMC, we don’t worry about handwriting issues because doctor orders are entered electronically in our system,” Kremer said. “There’s a barcode on each patient’s hospital wristband verifying the patient and medication to prevent errors. We even developed a barcode small uals employed in some aspect of mobile technology and the goal is to create 9,250 more jobs by 2015. “The state’s aging population gives impetus to this effort,” Daichendt said. “The baby boomers are getting older with more health care needs. Mobile technology provides better access and is cost efficient for most patients.” Electronic-based health care services, or eHealth, are closely related to mHealth but are differentiated as the technology that supports their functions and the delivery of health care. MHealth provides health care access but requires an eHealth system to manage, store and access the data. MHealth is considered a major player in reform issues such as cost-savings and streamlining the sys-tems. “The Connecticut research firm Gartner Research predicts mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web-access devices worldwide by 2013,” said Doug Zeffer, director of Mobile Technologies at Logic Solutions in Ann Arbor. Logic Solutions provides application and website development, website design and technology as well as outsourcing services. “Mobile technology in the health industry has a tremendous impact on health providers as well as consumers,” said Zeffer. “As a result, companies Linda Daichendt, CEO of MTAM, says Michigan is setting the pace when it comes to health-related mobile technology. www.corpmagazine.com 31 Publication List |
