OnSiteClinics.Org

PWC Reports on Mobile Health Trends

I think that everyone understands that there is an increasing dependence upon new technology and social media for any number of consumer finance decisions.  The Internet is here to stay, and we have to remind ourselves that hospitals and health care systems just don’t lead in areas of information exchange unless they are held hostage by reimbursement threats or regulations.

This is not necessarily the fault of individual providers in the health care system — hospitals follow trends, they do not lead.  Physicians don’t have capital.  It makes sense that these are not the areas to look to for change and innovation.  The consumer and the gaming industry and the Web industry are the places to watch for glimmers of the health care delivery future.  However, even mighty GOOGLE tried out health for awhile and backed away.  (I hope you know that your GOOGLE Health account now needs to be ported over to a thumb drive — Google, “the cloud,” and your health information are no longer connected!)

If you want to follow some of the trends, the philosophical, and functional analysis behind what is happening in m-Health, seek out PWC and their definitive survey reports on the subject.  Note:  This is a lot more than simple “tele-health” or whatever you want to call the connectivity of a patient to a doctor in real time over a CISCO router.  This is cell phone and consumer tech at the “app” level and on smart phones with a lot of smart employers becoming the first to innovate in this important segment of consumer services.

Integration has been a buzzword in the industry for decades, and we still don’t know what it means, but the new question may not be “How integrated are you?” but rather “How much bandwidth do you have?  Get the PWC report here.