GMIC Panel Discusses Mobile Health

Health is the easiest thing in the world to take for granted until you don’t have it. But how can mobile technology help solve health issues and make life easier for patients and doctors alike? This afternoon, Marcus Sigurdsson of McCann Health moderated a discussion with David Almstrom (managing director, Symbio), Liu Qingyu (founder, Joint Asia Public Health Initiative), and Cheuk Lee (general manager, Complete Medical Group) on mHealth, which is apparently the term cool people use to talk about mobile health apps and uses.

Before the panel began, Sigurdsson gave a short presentation and pointed out that it’s not all about helping people directly; health costs are also a significant burden on the global economy, and solving or streamlining health issues with mobile technology can save a lot of money. For example, Sigurdsson said that if the burden non-communicable diseases place on the economy could be eliminated, that could result in a GDP boost of 4-10 percent in developing countries like India.

The panelists all agreed that mobile apps can help people in a lot of different ways. Mobile apps can help doctors with everything from data entry to diagnosis, and they can also help patients manage their health, from counting calories to managing complex medication schedules.

David Alstrom pointed out that the proliferation of mobile phones alone has been a boon to the health industry. Apps aside, with more than 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide, even simple technologies like SMS can help governments deal with health problems. In South Africa, for example, Alstrom said the government dealt with a tuberculosis outbreak by using SMS messages to remind patients to take their medicine at the right time, which resulted in 99.3 percent of patients properly taking their medicine. This program cost only $16 per patient per year, which might seem a little expensive, but Alstrom pointed out that if more patients had failed to properly take their medication — which likely would have happened without the SMS reminders — the costs of continuing to treat those patients would be much higher.

Liu Qingyu was the first to point out a problem with mobile health that affects China with specific intensity, but also troubles the rest of the world: an overabundance of choice. Liu pointed out that searching Baidu (for example) for a health condition returns thousands of results, which often differ and can even be contradictory of just plain wrong. Liu argued, though, that mobile technology could serve to aid in the propogation of correct information, especially in the case of a crisis.

Alstrom and Cheuk agreed this would likely be a problem in the years to come. Cheuk bemoaned the “duplication of effort” and suggested he hoped a method could be found to unify many of the applications that do the same thing. Alstrom also pointed out that a lack of standards in hospitals can make it difficult to develop mobile apps that are universally applicable because different hospitals do things differently. “I’m not a big fan of standardizing everything,” he said, but the lack of standardization certainly makes everything more complicated.