How to Accelerate Mobile Health Care | #HuaweiPartner
The writer of this post, Glen Gilmore, is a “Top 100 Influencer” in Health Tech, the “Internet of Things”, and Augmented Reality. He served for several years as a member of the Board of Directors at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, in Hamilton, NJ, in the United States. An instructor of Digital Marketing and Emerging Technologies at the Rutgers University School of Business Executive Programs, Gilmore has been called a “futurist” by IBM. A Huawei “Key Opinion Leader”, he can be found on Twitter tweeting about Health Tech at @HealthcareLdr.

Tapping our Connected World for Healthcare Solutions

10% of our global GDP comes from the healthcare sector and that percentage is expected to grow to 23% of US GDP by 2023, according to telecommunications giant, Huawei.
A member of the global Fortune 100, Huawei identifies healthcare challenges, globally, as being threefold: high cost, low quality and poor accessibility. Accelerating mobile health care is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity with potentially enormous societal benefits coming from remote healthcare monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment.

Governments everywhere are struggling with how to contain healthcare costs while improving healthcare services. Mobile health care offers great promise at achieving both goals.
Mobile healthcare is about much more than having real-time access to information and resources in emergencies. Larger savings and greater societal impact can come from mobile health care that speeds up diagnosis, improves ongoing healthcare monitoring, reduces time in clinics, hospitals and time away from work or loved ones for people with chronic, as well as acute conditions.
For Huawei, the “status quo” in health care must change for improvements to come. Chronic diseases, according to Huawei, devour more than 70% of current healthcare costs, yet, the bulk of resources dedicated to health care “is designed for sporadic and acute diseases.” Mobile health care could be instrumental in efficiently addressing this disconnect.
Connectivity Must Come First — But, It’s Not Enough

Bringing mobile connectivity to areas lacking connectivity, such as Myanmar, is an obvious first-step in addressing gross disparities in global health care .
Bringing new connectivity carries with it an almost immediate accessibility to health care via mobile platforms with rapid and profound improvements in diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation for remote, underserved areas, as Huawei has discovered in Kenya.
Huawei realizes, however, that expanded connectivity, alone, will not succeed in accelerating sustainable mobile health care.
Acceleration of Mobile Health Care Requires New Collaboration and New Payment Models

As the world’s largest telecommunications company, Huawei notes, not surprisingly, that mobile network operators (MNOs) have a natural and leading role to play in accelerating the advance of mobile health care, through the delivery of reliable and secure networks.
In its latest mobile health care report, Huawei looks to new partnerships and new payment methods as being among the key accelerators to mobile health care adoption.

New partnerships and new payment methods: (1) collaboration among healthcare stakeholders — MNOs, governments, healthcare providers, insurers, employers and mobile medical device manufacturers — and (2) new payment models — such as as replacing the traditional “fee-for-service/procedure” payments with value or outcome-based reimbursement.
Mobile health care creates “win-win” opportunities. The cost savings from mobile health could inspire the sort of collaboration and new payment methods needed to accelerate mobile health, as each stakeholder sees its own interests being served, first and foremost, the healthcare consumer.

The Fitness Tracking “Wearables” Revolution
The fitness tracking “wearables” revolution gave us our first glimpse of mobile health: a connected wristband that could track our runs, our heart rate, and share our achievements with our friends. These devices, referred to broadly as “wearables”, have helped us more easily understand how similar devices could be used by healthcare providers to better track and assess health in real time — and do so reliably.
Shipments of consumer “wearables” (connected devices) reached an all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2016, with 33.9 million units being shipped, marking a growth of 16.9% year over year, according to a report from IDC, a market intelligence provider.
The Game Changer: The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT), a world in which nearly every device is a “connected” device, connected to the internet, continuously sharing and receiving information in real time, is ushering in a new world of mobile health care. We have moved far beyond fitness wristbands with sensors that simply track the miles we run, the route we take and our heartbeat.
Newer devices can collect additional body — biometric — information that is transferred securely over mobile networks to servers that input that information into servers with data analysis intelligence and treatment algorithms: real-time diagnosis with real-time treatment or emergency response recommendations.
Already, connected insulin pumps for people with diabetes send text messages to loved ones and care management teams about real-time conditions and treatment measures.
Soon, connected contact lenses embedded with sensors will transmit real-time information to about insulin levels to care management teams.

5G Connectivity Will Amp Up Mobile Health Care
In a prior report, released at the start of 2017, Huawei noted that the eventual adoption of 5G connectivity will help bring ubiquitous mobile health monitoring and diagnosis leading to “a much healthier world.”
What difference will the added speed and capacity of 5G make to the mobile healthcare industry? According to Huawei: “Advanced wireless communications and information processing technology can streamline medical diagnosis and better allocate and share medical resources and data.”
For medical practitioners, 5G will better equip them “to monitor individual health trends and outcomes for tailored treatments, and correlate health status with factors like pollution, temperature, lifestyle, diet, and sleep based on ubiquitous sensors,” according to the Huawei report.

A Final Point: Our Mobile Healthcare Future Will Be Augmented, Virtual and Far More Intelligent
The image of mobile health will soon move far beyond our current conceptions. Mention “telemedicine” today and ask people what comes to mind and they are likely to say they envision two flat screens with medical professionals and patients conversing in real time. Soon, that image will be replaced with a new reality, “virtual reality”: real-time immersive experiences brought to you by mixed-reality technologies (i.e., a combination of augmented and virtual realities), with greater, more personalized capabilities and user experience powered by artificial intelligence. Additional incentives for the acceleration of mobile health.
For additional news on mobile health care and health tech, join me on Twitter! @HealthcareLdr.
