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Mhealth in India- Pharmaceuticals

The Technology Driven data channels offers a key opportunity for pharma companies to restructure their sales and marketing model, improving their relationships with physicians and increasing compliance among patients. At the same time, patients are demanding a greater role in treatment decisions and seeking information from a range of online sources, resulting in a new age of consumerism in healthcare. If you take a look at the screenshots below, you will realize the biggest problems for Pharma companies today where mhealth can be a solution. Courtesy- Businessmonitor . Potential areas where Mhealth can be of use and can be deployed to tap the captive market driving non linear revenue. As far as returns are concerned in the Pharma sector in India, India has one of the largest pharmaceutical markets in Asia, currentlyvalued at US$16.32bn. However, due to the country’s vast 1.17bn population, individual spending is actually very low. Pharmaceutical expenditure in 2009 was 1.24% of ...

The Health Website

Good Morning friends! Hope you are doing good.Today we will talk about a Health website. I keep getting these mails from Health care Enterprises and new entrepreneurs asking for some suggestions and help for their health website, and I really don't get time to revert to them. This post of mine will help them understand and pave their vision better. Q1. How people are going to find you and notice you online? Ans- Internet represents less than 10% of the total retail sales. Online Business is of importance to consumers just because of two things: a. Speed b. Quality of Information People are loyal to discounts, not you. Bundle your packages and wow your visitors. Position yourself as an expert whether it is apparel, cosmetics, shoes or medicines. If one product you sell-> Keep your customers informed about its use, your degree of expertise in that, related offers -> if possible provide buy back and all. Q2. How to beat the competitor? Ans- The thing that will make you win on we...

Mhealth Model- Dr SMS in India- The Success Story

The... patient should be made to understand that he or she must take charge of his own life. Don't take your body to the doctor as if he were a repair shop. -Quentin Regestein The World of “Speed- Living”! as simple, easy and compact as a mobile phone. Reminds me of Aircel’s popular advertisement “Pocket main Rocket hai”… I think”pocket main Rocket hai” is the right definition of Mhealth today! Many mobile projects struggle with scale and impact. While a mobile health project may run well with a small number of patients in one hospital, expanding the scope of a project until it is large enough to have real impact takes money, time, and widespread support of key stakeholders in a given community. And that is one of the biggest reasons why Mhealth is not keeping too well now-a-days and is suffering from “Pilotitis”. Therefore, KSITM took this initiative to launch DR SMS in Kerala, aimed at improving health of the citizens of Kerala by improving access to health care resou...

We talk about 600 million subscribers in India- Are these subscribers or Connections?

A recent report by India Mobile 2010, shuns TRAI for claiming a base of 621.28 million mobile subscribers at the end of March this year.India is without doubt the fastest growing telecom market in the world, but it had only 304 million subscribers at the end of May this year, according to a report by Juxt Consult. While Juxt survey measures and reports both the mobile users (subscribers) and mobile connections (subscriptions, ie who take new connections), TRAI data reports only the mobile connections, (which it mistakenly calls ‘subscribers’). Apart from that, while TRAI data indicates a 75:25 split in urban and rural mobile connections, the split at both the subscriber level and the active connection level as found in the Juxt report is closer to 50:50. The report says that the mobile subscriber base in rural and urban India is 146 million and 158 million, respectively. Also, according to the Planning Commission, 27.5 per cent of the population was living below the pove...

Public Partnership- Mobile Healthcare India

Was busy the last weekend preparing for the GTF conference in Delhi.You can learn more about this by clicking on the emblem on the left . Government Transformation Forum is first of its kind forum aimed at enhancing collaboration and exchange of learning practices among the industry, academia, civil society organizations and the public sector in India. Through this forum, the organizers intend to keep the stakeholders abreast of the latest trends and cutting edge technologies so that the e‐Government programs are designed keeping in view the needs of the next generation. You can expect a lot of action here... I was thinking while discussing the mobile health care concept with my peers, that if in case my Medical Insurance can't give me freedom from long waiting periods; my prescription delivered at home; Nurse and physiotherapy facility and continuous monitoring for my old parents and Real time Emergency Response in seconds, probably I will not opt for one. But in India, is it...

Move ahead on MHealth

I have many many people, many startups and several small and big firms working on mhealth today. UHC is coming into it, Vodafone, Ericcsson, Nokia and many others have already participated in the same. The upcoming news boards like mobihealthnews, telecareaware etc. are also up.WHO is into it, so is World bank, mhealth alliance is formed by UN and much much more. But why aren't we moving ahead on it ...what is required? The first thing is strategising. We need to go step by step especialliy in developing countries, coz here its the Operator's market unlike other countries. What I and Vikas were debating about was whether you do the technical work (software) on the ground or build solutions beforehand. As usual, it depends on the circumstances of a particular situation and project. My belief is that each country should have a platform available for launching national health services. Governments should either enable the process by working hand-in-hand or fund and get out of the ...

512 kbps of Mobile Healthcare

The other day I was sitting with my Mentors and I realised that Doctors in India can do wonders if we provide them with 512 kbps bandwidth on mobiles. Apollo Telemedicine Network Foundation and Ericsson started a program sometime back in 2007 called "Gramjyoti" in rural India and that was considered to be a big foray of telemedicine in rural healthcare.Thousands of people within the Gramjyoti project area covering 18 villages and 15 towns were able to use broadband applications. Ericsson worked in partnership with Apollo Hospitals, Hand in Hand (a local NGO), Edurite, One97, CNN and Cartoon Network to deliver a range of services including telemedicine, e-education and e-governance. Point to be noticed is the prolem area. Sometimes the main factor itself is not the sole criterion on which the success of a project depends and that is what we learnt. Those were the days of GSM technology and the conditions of roads in India was bad especially in the rural areas. Consider a van w...

mhealth in developing countries

The potential of mobile telephony to bring health care to the majority Acute and emerging epidemiological challenges are encouraging public sector to welcome and support the development of increasingly innovative health care initiatives. Given that nearly 70 out of every 100 people carry a mobile phone in the region, if the easy-to-use mobile platform can be applied to health care to contribute to increased equity, mobile care could also contribute to improved clinical outcomes and productivity, as well as to better public health monitoring and education. Oh yeah! we know about the potentials but then where does mhealth exactly fit in? Is it for Prevention?- Disease management or Real time monitoring?.. Actually Mobile Health is gonna be everything- Mobile health is a recently coined term, largely defined as health practice supported by mobile devices. For purposes of this note, mobile health practice includes public health, clinical medicine, and self-monitoring supported by mobile ph...

Health on Mobiles

Mobiles have revolutionarised Healthcare, a big way, They are further going to make a mark in developing countries like India because of its reasonable penetration, Good subscriber base and ease to use. The availability of low-cost mobile phones and the already broad coverage of GSM networks in India is a huge opportunity to provide services that would trigger development and improve people’s lives. Today's Newspaper (Times of India) says- "3G Handsets to cost less thanRs. 5000 In a year"..Read more on Page 17 tuesday, September 15, 2009. Yesterday, When a friend asked me - How secure will be the consultations provided by doctors over mobiles??, Say if somebody changes or tampers the prescription before it reaches the target consumer?, If there is some error in despatch , some inaccuracy etc., So till the time HIPAA compliance or HL7 server capacity is leveraged, Mobiles based Healthcare delivery will continue be a falcy. The Good News , Dr Neelesh shared with me on Healt...

Mobile Healthcare scenerio in India

India is the second most populous country of the world and has changing socio-political-demographic and morbidity patterns that have been drawing global attention in recent years. Despite several growth-orientated policies adopted by the government, the widening economic, regional and gender disparities are posing challenges for the health sector. About 75% of health infrastructure, medical manpower and other health resources are concentrated in urban areas where only 27% of the Indian population live. The new buzz is Mobile Health; in simple words it means access to valuable information and consultation for preventive and post treatment advice targeted at doctors and end users. The idea is to use telecom as a backbone tool to leverage the current brick and mortar model of Healthcare delivery across the country. The scope of Telecom as well as technology to disseminate valuable and personalised Health information is now evolving. Better practices are expected to rely heavily on telecom...