Mobile technology has tremendous potential to have a substantial positive impact on health outcomes, according to several speakers from IPI’s second annual Communications Summit held yesterday in Washington DC.
Dr. Anand Iyer, president of WellDoc, explained how diabetes patients have a number of variables they must manage in order to maintain optimal health and to avoid further damage. Mobile applications can help them keep track of these variables, make recommendations about sugar consumption, and (critically) remind them to take medications and to manage insulin dosages. As is well known, the largest potential margin of improvement for such conditions lies in better patient management, particularly in making sure that prescriptions are filled and that medications are taken on schedule.
These same apps offer benefits to patients with other conditions as well. Imagine, says Dr. Iyer, an asthma patient getting off a plane on a trip. A mobile app, using wireless technology to identify the new location, can notify the traveler of the high pollen count in the city where he’s just arrived, and could recommend a preventative dose of medication.
And doctors are embracing rather than resisting these new technologies, according to Dr. Christopher Wasden, Managing Director of Strategy and Innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Dr. Wasden reports that doctors recognize the potential not only to use mobile health technologies to improve patient management, but also to save time and money within their own practices.
And in the developing world, mobile phones are empowering consumers in a number of innovative ways, especially in helping consumers avoid the plaque of counterfeit drugs. In many African countries, counterfeit drugs account for up to 40 percent of the drugs in the marketplace, which has ominous implications for patients. But according to Bright Simons, a policy expert from Ghana and coordinator of the mPedigree Network, consumers in Nigeria and several other countries can use text messaging from their mobile phones to determine whether a package contains a genuine product, or whether it contains a counterfeit or expired product.
What makes all this possible, of course, is the importance of continued innovation and the ubiquity of wireless devices, not only in the industrialized world but also in developing countries. Such powerful devices in the hands of almost all consumers have the potential to dramatically improve people’s lives in ways that we are only just now beginning to realize.