Chris Wasden September 23, 2012, 10:53 am This shouldn't be too surprising since we saw the same phenomenon a decade ago when organizations began to experiment with the internet. At first they had no idea why or how it would impact their core operations. For this reason, their internet initiatives were done at the periphery or outside the core businesses and practices. In time, the more innovative figured out how to leverage the internet in such a way that now a decade later this isn't a part of any organization, with the exception of healthcare organizations, that isn't transformed due to the internet. Unfortunately, healthcare tends to be a decade or two behind other industries in adoption. The last figure I saw for email adoption among physicians was less than 20%, where as in other industries it must be well over 95%. In our own surveys we have done we have found that the two parts of healthcare organizations that are experimenting the most with mHealth are the marketing department and IT. Marketing is conducting experiments to try and increase patient or procedure volumes in ways that have virtually no impact on the practice of medicine. Doctors do what they have always done, they just do more of it. When ever any of these marketing oriented mHealth initiatives tend to require the physicians to practice medicine in any new ways, these experiments tend to end and can't find the funding to move forward. On the IT side, we find that this department is conducting experiments to demonstrate that they can do mHealth experiments and to understand what must change in order to enable mHealth. Once this is demonstrated, the IT department then runs in to the same brick wall that marketing does. No clinical vision or focus on how to use mHealth to improve care, decrease costs, or improve access. It is interesting when you look at our global survey on mHealth that doctors in developed markets are the most reluctant to apply mHealth to the practice of medicine, where as consumers around the world score almost identically with regards to why they want mHealth: lower costs, greater and more convenient access, better information and more control and empowerment of their health. Give the nature of medicine, we will likely be a decade behind other industries in leveraging the power of mHealth to transform healthcare. But it is our view, that no other technology has the power and potential to drive this transformation than mHealth.
