Mobile Health Initiatives Heating UP

In the past couple of days, I have received a few emails from some members of LinkedIn groups that I belong to mentioning the tremendous groundswell being generated by federal funds allocations slated for the mobile and wireless industries. This is the much heralded American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA.

A colleague in the industry forwarded me two pieces of intelligence out there. I will link you to one of them, here: This is the mHealth Initiatives cluster of target areas for growth.

Points to pull out from there:

•Drug databases
•Medical calculators
•Reference programs
•Decision support for both physicians and nurses
•Tracking (weight, blood pressure, etc.)
•Patient history accessing, managing, and documenting
•Communication managers
•Payer tools (coding, eligibility determination, etc.)

The same colleague found this bit of information and I thought it would be useful, as well:

The research firm [Pike & Fischer] predicts that wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel will become key players in the increasingly wireless-enabled telemedicine market, while smaller companies like software developers and device makers will be key acquisition targets. AT&T is likely to dominate, however, the report predicted. The firm also points to the need to control health care costs as another driver of the growing telemedicine market, while stimulus funding from ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) will lead to more remote patient monitoring services and mobile access to EHRs, according to Pike & Fischer.