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July 13, 2010

Qualcomm's Wireless Health Ecosystem Promotes Healthcare Innovation


Donald Jones serves as vice president of business development for health & life sciences at Qualcomm (News - Alert). In addition to his responsibilities at Qualcomm for integrating wireless technology of all types in the health and life sciences markets, Don Jones is a long-time leader in wireless health. In 2005, he founded the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance.  He is a founding board member of the West Wireless Health Institute and currently serves on the boards of the Alliance Healthcare Foundation and the American Telemedicine Association (News - Alert).   In this interview, Don discusses the drivers and barriers for wireless and mobile health adoption as well as examples of wireless healthcare innovation and benefits for both consumers and physicians.
Q: Could you talk a little about Qualcomm’s strategies and priorities for wireless health technology development, products and partnerships?
 
Don:   The first priority has been to build an ecosystem of all the different players and stakeholders who are part of wireless health. Qualcomm has been engaged with getting the wireless carriers and wireless industry ecosystem participants to understand the healthcare folks as well as working with healthcare providers and organizations to get them to understand the wireless technologies and what is required from a new wireless health ecosystem to make things work. 
 
Qualcomm’s corporate priority is to help create the vertical market for wireless health care to take advantage of the availability of wireless networks and emerging medical devices. As more wireless biosensors and devices connect to the Internet using wireless chips and cellular services, the size of this market will grow, to the benefit of the entire ecosystem. 
 
Q: What do you see as the most important innovations in mobile and wireless health technology today?
 
Don: From a broad, philosophical viewpoint the most important innovation and opportunity is enabling consumers to better manage their own health. Wireless can do this by providing direct access to information and tools to help the individual understand their current health state and if they need to see a healthcare provider as well as helping them to decide what type of health service they should seek.  Putting a well-informed consumer in charge of this type of healthcare decision is a major transformation.
 
Technically, one innovation that I find most interesting is the smart bandage. Smart bandages are low-cost, peel and stick disposable biosensors –with a wireless connection. They are designed to monitor specific conditions and to be easy to put on and wear, and easy to take off and dispose. For example, Corventis (News - Alert) has developed a smart bandage that sticks onto the chest to monitor heart rate and detect arrhythmia. It is FDA approved, and is the first of a number of such wireless biosensors that Corventis will bring to market for health monitoring and data reporting.
 
Diabetics now have the option of using smart biosensors for continuous glucose monitoring. Dexcom offers an approved band aid-like sensor that measures and transmits glucose levels for a week before it needs to be replaced. That’s an enormous improvement over fingerstick measurement.
 
I believe that the smart bandage sector will expand rapidly to hundreds of millions of these devices being used annually – all of them using wireless connections. Qualcomm has developed low power radio technology and chips that will be coming out soon and that will be very useful for the design of the next generation of smart bandages and sensors.
 
Q: Are there still barriers to be overcome before these and other wireless health innovations become available and affordable for the majority of consumers? 

Don:  One barrier is getting new devices and innovations approved through the regulatory process—but that’s simply a matter of time and process.  An adoption barrier is lack of awareness by consumers and particularly by physicians and other care providers. Compared to the speed we are seeing in consumer electronics and mobile phone adoption cycles, the adoption of new technologies in health care has been very, very slow –about 17 years in North America.
 
We think that consumers will be leading a lot of the wireless health adoption; for example, we are already seeing the popularity of consumer mHealth apps for smartphones. We also see accelerating adoption for smartphone applications that actually solve a problem or save time for physicians, along with strong sensor adoption in hospitals. The widespread adoption of wireless for home health monitoring will likely take the longest.
 
Q: Can you give some examples of wireless health products that solve a problem for physicians, or that provide clear medical practice benefits?
 
Don:  Myca Health is a great example. Myca provides doctors and practice groups with a platform that integrates mobile communications, Internet and e-mail with patients and colleagues with a standards based electronic medical record system, appointment and scheduling system and other practice management tools. Using Myca, doctors can reduce overhead time and cost for practice management and also track the time that they spend on e-mail, mobile and video consultations with patients. That allows medical practices to capture those types of consultations and event tele-visits into their billing systems. Recording these interactions creates incentives to spend more time talking with patients and answering their immediate questions on line or on the phone and helps to integrate wireless health services into traditional fee-for-services practice management models. Plus, if patients want to pay a small fee for more direct mobile and online access to consultations and other services, Myca provides a module for doctors to manage that in a cost-effective way.  So it becomes another source of revenue instead of an uncompensated drain on scarce time and resources.
 
Myca already has several hundred doctors and clinical practices using their solution – in fact we have installed it at the Qualcomm Corporate Health Center where it’s proving to be very popular.
Another good example is AirStrip OB which streams high resolution images from fetal monitors directly to the obstetrician’s smartphone. It allows closer monitoring of patients without requiring the doctor to be at the hospital to review the latest information.
 
Of course, there are also some negatives that are causing physicians concern – including the fear of being deluged with too much data from multiple wireless monitoring systems plus the issue of liability if they don’t respond immediately to wireless alerts. I point out that most wireless sensors and monitoring apps are designed to use an intermediary service rather than stream data directly to physicians. This intermediary service is monitoring the data streams and making the decision of when to call the doctor.
 
Q: You have been working in the health and wireless sectors for over 30 years, including almost 9 years as an executive at Qualcomm.  Can you sum up some of lessons have you learned about wireless health?
 
Don: Whenever there is a disruptive new technology, we can expect that there will be disruption in the marketplace and that always creates a push-pull tension as stakeholders and ecosystem members have to adapt. The key benefit of wireless technology is that it makes things happen faster than otherwise –in medicine that can be translated into benefits such as faster care delivery and faster treatment for patients which leads to improved health outcomes. Some of these benefits are seen primarily by the consumer and some by the doctor or the health organization. 
 
A key lesson for today’s wireless health is that the adoption curve will be driven by consumers and not so much by the traditional healthcare providers. Adoption will be helped along by medical device companies and other vendors getting wireless health solutions approved by the FDA and into the market as well as by alternative business models to support wireless health services. 
 
I have also learned that wireless health has enormous potential for business growth and industry transformation over the long term that makes this area very important and interesting to a lot of major players in the wireless industry. Hundreds of millions of wireless sensors and medical devices will need network connections and services – this area is going to be one of the biggest future growth sectors for wireless.
 
In addition to the industry impact, wireless health is a critical priority for our social and economic well-being. We need innovations that will dramatically lower today’s health care costs. Consumers who take charge of personal health information and become more involved in managing their own care are a part of the solution. So are wireless monitoring, connectivity and services that expand healthcare options beyond the model of personal visits to emergency rooms and doctors offices. The old models of treatment are changing – instead of “take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” doctors will be saying “apply the smart bandage and it will keep us all up to date on whether you need to call or visit.”

Dr. Cronin is a Professor of Management in the Information Systems Department at Boston College. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Monda
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