Wide adoption of mobile health (mHealth) solutions worldwide can lead to a decrease of 30 percent in the number of maternal and perinatal mortality, according to a new study conducted by The Boston Consulting Group and Telenor Group.
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| Source: Telenor |
The study, entitled "Socio-Economic Impact of mHealth", indicates also that mHealth solutions for elderly care can reduce costs by some 25% and that expenditures related to data collection can be reduced by 24%.
The authors said that mHealth is expected to benefit from the explosive growth in global mobile phone penetration. They added that the necessary infrastructure already exists as the number of mobile subscriptions is expected to reach 7.4 billion by 2015.
According to the study, the existing mHealth technology richness and network capacity is sufficient, both on simple feature phones and on smartphones.
“The technological development and successful pilots around the world demonstrate that the time for mHealth has come," said Knut Haanæs, Global Leader, Sustainability Practice, The Boston Consulting Group. "Accelerating adoption will require orchestrating multiple stakeholders, including the alignment of incentives for healthcare professionals to adopt mHealth.”
The researchers concluded that mobile health technology can offer different countries sizeable benefits, lead to economic growth and promise a better life for individuals. They noted that currently, healthcare systems are overburdened, costly and incapable of meeting the needs of a growing population.
Aerotel Medical Systems has received the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Certification as well as Industry Canada (IC) certification for its innovative location-based personal alert system, GeoSkeeper.
The approvals pave the way for Aerotel to start offering the GeoSkeeper system in the lucrative North American markets of the USA and Canada. GeoSkeeper is already being sold in other markets around the world, including Israel, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America.
"GeoSkeeper offers a real solution to the needs of the North American medical alert and personal safety sectors," said David Rubin, Aerotel Medical Systems President & CEO. "Adding GeoSkeeper to Aerotel's family of products sold in this market will enable Aerotel to further expand its presence in the North American market for the benefit of both patients and healthcare providers."
Aerotel has started negotiations with several security and medical alert service providers in North America in order to start offering the GeoSkeeper™ to the growing market of medical alert and personal security in the near future.
Aerotel will showcase its mobile health (mHealth) and other telemedicine solutions at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012, Barcelona, Spain, at Hall 2, booth 2C12 (Israel National Pavilion).
The GeoSkeeper personal safety and location system is specifically designed to provide peace of mind for elderly, chronically ill, children or lone workers, as well as their relatives and caregivers.
Aerotel has been active in the USA and Canada for more than a decade offering a wide variety of telemedicine solutions, including its personal handheld electrocardiogram (ECG) systems, homecare data hubs, and telemedicine remote monitoring software solutions.
Aerotel's telemedicine solutions are in use by various remote monitoring service providers, taking care of chronically ill patients belonging to various health care organizations.
Mobile healthcare and medical applications downloads will rise to 142 million in 2016 from an expected 44 million in 2012, according to a report on the mHealth market issued by research company Juniper Research.
Juniper analysts said they expect the number of patients monitored by mobile networks to rise to some 3 million by 2016, with the majority of them in the United States. The rise will be fueled by the market for healthcare peripherals and increased smartphone processing power.
"Remote patient monitoring will step in to reduce the cost burden of unhealthy lifestyles and aging populations," said Anthony Cox Associate Analyst at Juniper.
The report indicates that monitoring of cardiac outpatients is currently very dominant in the remote patient monitoring market as insurance companies try to lower their expanses. This is expected to change in the future, with the management of diabetes, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) and other chronic diseases leading the market.
Juniper added that developing markets continue to benefit from SMS-based education programmes and stand to benefit in medium term from app-based healthcare services such as mobile ultrasound that are now being developed.
EHR (electronic health records), which have not gained significant traction, will become in the future an important component of mHealth offerings.
