Several years ago I had the extraordinary privilege of lunching with probably the most famous and important public relations person in the world, Regis McKenna —the man credited with literally putting Silicon Valley on the map. As might be expected our discussion covered a lot of ground, but what caught my attention was Regis’ passion for his view of the future importance of telemedicine on all of our lives.
Talk ranged from what is now relatively commonplace and being enhanced at an amazing pace. It included things like multimedia interactions between first responders and hospitals to remote monitoring of patients attached to network aware devices, and the ability to provide distant medical experts with high-resolution views of various types of scans. It also touched on what technology was going to be needed to accelerate the role of communications, particularly wireless, in the future delivery of quality care.
I bring this up for two reasons. First is to thank Regis for giving me “the bug” to watch the sector. The second is to highlight FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s recent hosting of an mHealth summit that put the spotlight on despite how far we have come, we can and must do more. In fact, at the summit the chairman challenged the private sector members of the audience (composed of industry executives, and subject matter experts from academia and government) to help accelerate the wireless healthcare solutions adoption in the U.S. In case you missed it, much of what the chairman had to say is captured on the Official FCC Blog, and these and his full remarks can be a valuable investment of your time.
The facts
As the blog points out, “wireless health care innovations hold tremendous promise to transform health care delivery, not only by revolutionizing the way patients manage their own care, but also by cutting costs and increasing efficiencies across our health care system.” Indeed, the numbers that are context for the need for acceleration are stunning on both the cost and potential cost-savings fronts:
- The U.S. spends about $2 trillion annually on health care expenses—17 percent of GDP and more than any other industrialized country.
- Chronic disease management accounts for 75 percent of total health system costs.
- Studies have found that remote patient monitoring reduced the risk of hospitalization by 47 percent reduced hospital stay length, and reduced office visits by 65 percent.
There was even some anecdotal information regarding findings that a monitored patient is twice as likely to survive a heart attack as an unmonitored patient. And, a show stopper is that economist Robert Litan has estimated that remote monitoring technologies could save as much as $197 billion over the next 25 years in the U.S., largely through better management of chronic disease. This is a big challenge with big opportunities and huge societal benefits.
Getting from here to there
The summit was follow-on to the FCC’s action in May of this year which made the U.S. the only country in the world to dedicate radio spectrum for wireless monitoring sensors and other devices, better known by the industry moniker, Mobile Body Area Networks (MBANs). The chairman used the summit to announce a plan, that he promised fast action on, to:
- Ease the red tape involved for researchers and entrepreneurs being able to test and evaluate new wireless health innovations
- Make getting an experimental spectrum license less of a burdensome process
- Create an Innovation Zone license that allows pre-approved spectrum use experimentation in specified locations
I am always impressed by the chairman’s language for getting people’s attention and was particularly taken on this occasion by his remark that, “Last November, the Commission dedicated spectrum for Medical Micropower Networks, which have the potential - literally - to enable paraplegics to stand. Just weeks ago, we adopted new rules to allow greater use of spectrum for Medical Body Area Network, or MBAN, devices. MBANs provide a cost-effective way to monitor patients wirelessly, providing more information to physicians and giving patients mobility and greater independence.”
I also liked his statement, “We need to go beyond the promise and potential, and emphasize rigorous evaluation and evidence-based innovations.”
He challenged summit participants to research the roadblocks to rapid deployment of mHealth technology, and present a private sector-led plan to address those barriers. He also cited Former NIH Director and White House policy advisor Zeke Emanuel, who in a recent New York Times op-ed recently made the point, “We need to stop glorifying every new technology as an innovation. ‘New’ only matters when it’s proved better than what we had before, when it prolongs survival, reduces side effects or improves quality of life – or maintains the current standard of care at a lower cost.”
What’s next?
What you have to admire about the chairman is that he knows how to use the bully pulpit when he has one. He concluded his remarks by asking the industry to deliver a short list of “concrete” suggestions of what needs to happen in order for the industry in collaboration with the government to spur the adoption of mHealth technology. He asked that those attending the summit serve as an operating group to move this effort and asked Robert Jarrin at Qualcomm, Doug Trauner at TheCarrot, and Dr. Julian Goldman at CIMIT to help develop next steps.
As noted at the top, thanks to Regis I have a long-term interest in what now is being called mHealth. I resonate with the remarks of both the chairman and Zeke Emanuel that the focus has to be not so much on the wow factor of how new a solution is, but whether it solves a problem. As witness to the travails of elderly and physically challenged people understanding their condition when they are not in a medical setting, responding to changes in their status in a timely manner, providing their care-givers with fact-based directives, and even doing little things like needing alerts to take which of their medicines at what time, all I can say is that while Chairman Genachowski has his critics and faults, on this one his timing could not be better.
Cutting the red tape and clearing the way for experimentation are great first steps as well as a very nice way to engage the various parts of the wireless healthcare ecosystem. Whether it be the Medical Micropower Networks or the MBANs, this is all welcome news. We will be reporting back as the next steps do in fact move from being suggestions to being concrete.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
