Data Revolution in Healthcare and Lifesciences Industry

Dear Friends, It is been a while since I wrote my last post. Life hasn't been easy after we claimed the title of "the only niche mHealth consulting company" in India. But we are doing fairly good by going just well. This post of mine is centred towards Disease surveillance and missing links in India. Very recently when I joined the UN's Best Practices and Innovations Working Group for Maternal and child health, I went deep dive to understand the problems in this sector. The revelations were quite alarming... Infant mortality remains as high as 63 deaths per 1,000 live births. Most infant deaths occur in the first month of life, with up to 47 per cent in the first week Diarrhoea remains the second major cause of death among children, after respiratory-tract infections. Unhygienic practices and unsafe drinking water are some of its main causes. India has an estimated 220,000 children infected by HIV. It is estimated that 55,000 to 60,000 children are born e...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

The Mobile Healthcare Industry summit brought up all the stakeholders to discuss and share views on the best practices all across the world. The Post Conference Workshop led by me on “Mobile Healthcare Models for emerging markets” provided a participating opportunity for all players in the ecosystem to clearly define and strategize Challenges as well as opportunities in countries like India, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia etc. I was pleased to see the overwhelming response and enthusiasm. Some Key points that were discussed were why emerging markets? What is the role of mhealth in India, Africa etc.? Who will pay? Why will they adopt mhealth systems? Pretti Lounamaa and Seppo Luede suggested some very initial points to approach these methodologies. First, Size the market, when we are talking about market we are not only talking about the addressable market but also the number of stakeholders and customers who are willing as well as able to purchase or are interested to deploy. This was...

ehealth 2009 was a very successful conference this year.The attendence was very impressive and it was great to see Public sector participation there. In my session, i.e. Online and Mobile Applications in Healthcare – exploring new service channels and business models, Dr Rathan Kelkar, Director, Kerala IT Mission, Govt. of Kerala shared some of the robust Government initiatives as per Kerala's IT mission.Dr. SMS is one such Initiative. The sole idea of the project is to help people to use their mobile phones to receive information on health resources and to provide the user with a comprehensive list of medical facilities available in that locality, such as hospitals having expertise in various medical specialties (Cardiology, Opthalmology, ENT etc). To avail the facility the user has to send an SMS to a pre-designated number, the contents of the SMS should be the Pin code of the locality for which he or she wants to know about. This pilot was tried in Kozhikode District and after i...

Countries like Africa, India ,China where disease burden is high with infectious and communicable diseases and a number of lifestyle disorders adding up 1.2% annually to the ailing population, How can subscription based services using mobile phones penetration in these areas help the conditions improve? To start of with lets say we will start with pushing SMS to people who will subscribe for this at Rs. 30/month in India. What all categories should be covered? What should be the model which will define its success? How far can we evolve this service? I think of categories like providing Info about health awareness program, Diabetes, Hypertension, Pregnancy etc. What all do you think should be there? Feedback welcome!!!!!!

Pharma Companies under Focus How can Mobiles add value to the B2B order processing and Process Management? Here you will have to go by the Healthcare Value chain. Mobility value add in Order processing i.e. B2B will be helpful only if: It eases out product procurement and delivery It helps stumbling blocks to improved value chain operations For this one need to understand the strategies in three product areas i.e. pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and medical-surgical products and other such deliverables.Let's take the pharmacy market first! There is already a scope for healthcare products/Devices and Pharma products as far as process management in the value chain are concerned. Introduction of M-commerce in health care value chain is also worth pondering over. For eg. Mobiles can be useful in effectively managing a small scale industry supply chain. Similarly, managing prescription order workflow in a pharmacy network can be done using mobile phones. A wo...