This week in mobile health news brings preventative care moves from two insurers: UnitedHealth and Kaiser Permanente Southern California. UnitedHealth has teamed with YMCAs in six cities to promote exercise and healthy eating among pre-diabetics, while KP SoCal has teamed up with Body By Jake founder Jake Steinfeld's startup FitOrbit to provide online and mobile fitness coaching to its overweight members. Rumor has it some of these activities may have been spurred by the recently passed health reform bill, which requires payers to cover members regardless of medical conditions.
The seemingly slow trickle of investment money into the wireless health sector continued this week as Sotera Wireless (nee Triage Wireless) filed a report with the SEC that showed it snagged close to $11 million in VC funding -- investor(s) undisclosed. (By the way, if you are an investor interested in mHealth or already actively investing in the indsutry -- send me a note, I have a few questions for you.)
Dearth of investments aside, research analysts seem mostly bullish on wireless remote monitoring and its future revenue potentials: This week Jupiter Research tossed its prediction hat into the ring with $1.9 billion in revenues by 2014. See how that stacks up to previous revenue projections for the industry.
Judging by some of the pricetags of the market research reports, wireless health research revenues are up and up, but we have you covered with five free mobile health reports worth reading, including the recently published, "How Smartphones Are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers" by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, M.A., M.H.S.A. and published by the California Health Care Foundation. Thanks to Jane for inviting me to peer review the paper -- it's a must read.
Last week's focus on meter integration (Nokia and Entra Health) continues this week as Bayer announced that Didget, the glucose meter that connects to (WiFi-enabled) Nintendo DS devices is coming to the US. It's a story about video games, diabetes and mobility. Here's the link.
Perhaps the biggest news this week, however (which was a bit of a sleeper hit) was Verizon Wireless partnering with BL Healthcare: “Verizon Wireless selected BL Healthcare as an ecosystem developer that best aligned with our vision of remote, patient-focused, next-generation healthcare,” John Maschenic, director of healthcare solutions for Verizon Wireless explained in the press release. The carrier sounds poised to create a suite of services atop BL's platform. We expect much more on this in the coming months.
Briefly, in government news, HHS awarded $15 million to Harvard Medical School to develop, research, and prototype an "iTunes-like" architecture for EMR applications. More here.
Finally, worried about mHealth taking away the physician's "touch"? Well, researchers in Hong Kong have you covered.
