Overshadowed by the glitz of more consumer-friendly applications ‘mobile health’, or mHealth, has quietly been taking the world by storm, as synergies grow between the telecommunications and healthcare industries.
While mHealth has been around for some time — the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation have been using wireless communications to support global health and disaster relief work since 2005 — developments in cellular technology have given healthcare providers an unprecedented range of tools to reach out to their patients.
Part of a growing trend focused on digitizing healthcare, mHealth uses mobile communications technology to provide health monitoring and reporting services. This results in greater convenience for patients, more effective treatment for the chronically ill and efficient use of precious healthcare resources. With mHealth programmes, patients suffering from diseases like diabetes, heart ailments or asthma will no longer need to visit the hospital for routine checks.
Now, mHealth is all set to make its debut in the United Arab Emirates with an agreement between etisalat and Swedish telecommunications major, Ericsson. In a recently announced Memorandum of Understanding, Etisalat will deploy Ericsson’s Mobile Health platform in the UAE, allowing medical professionals to remotely monitor the health of adult and paediatric patients using mobile technology.
Abdulla Hashim, Senior Vice-President of Business Solutions at etisalat, observes that the UAE’s high mobile penetration rate, combined with advancements in mobile technology, presents a unique opportunity.
He says: “Chronic diseases can be managed effectively by not only becoming aware and changing habits but also by continuous monitoring. This in turn allows people to live a better quality of life and also reduces the cost of delivering healthcare. We believe that these two goals require leading entities to collaborate and create an informative and proactive healthcare ecosystem enabled by technology.”
The Ericsson Mobile Health (EMH) platform is capable of monitoring patients suffering from a variety of diseases that do not require hospitalisation. This is expected to prove particularly useful in the UAE, which boasts of world class healthcare standards, but still grapples with chronic healthcare issues such as diabetes and cardio vascular disease.
Rainer Herzog, who heads business development for E-Health for Ericsson in the Middle East, explains that the platform is designed to work with health conditions commonly found in the country. He says: “With EMH we are able to securely and easily monitor body values such as blood pressure, heart function, lung function, body weight, pulse rate and, very soon, blood sugar levels.”
According to Herzog, the system is sophisticated enough to allow doctors to define individual thresholds for body values, instantly alerting medical professionals if readings exceed set parameters. In addition, patients will be able to alert their doctors in case of a medical emergency simply by pressing a button, while doctors will be able to set up electronic alerts to remind their patients to take their medication.
The system relies on a communication device, which is a little bigger than a smartphone and transmits data from a range of sensors. Using a monitoring schedule established by a doctor, the patient simply switches on the device, puts on the sensors and the system gathers and transmits the necessary data, alerting the patient when the task is complete. The doctor can then access the data using a password-protected website that also contains the patient’s medical history for easy analysis.
The benefits, Herzog says, are clear to see, “It is a very easy and secure way to ensure that patients are doing well and prevent acute events or emergencies. EMH can also save the healthcare system, as well as hospitals and care providers, valuable time and costs. With EMH, we aim to prevent or decrease hospitalisation rates by closely monitoring different body values such as blood pressure or heart and lung function. As a result, patients can be kept in a more stable condition and can be kept away from hospitals more often.”
Pointing out that demand for mHealth is being driven by both, the evolution of technology and pressing issues facing healthcare systems such as burgeoning costs, Herzog says, “In many countries, expenditure on chronic disease is in the range of 70 to 80 per cent of total healthcare costs and this situation is going to worsen over the next few years if appropriate action isn’t taken. The challenge will be to provide good levels of care to people, whilst at the same time containing rising healthcare costs.”
And demand for mHealth is clearly set to grow. While Ericsson is already in talks with telecommunications providers in other parts of the Gulf region, including countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, Hashim reveals that Etisalat has already received positive responses from various health authorities in the UAE, in addition to private hospitals and medical service providers.
“We are in discussion with a number of entities and will soon be announcing a pilot project in this area,” he says, adding: “By using mHealth, customers can reduce the overall cost of healthcare through effectively reducing the number of incidents, with proactive monitoring and information sharing. Hence, in effect all the concerned entities — patients, insurance companies and health authorities — would be very keen to adopt the mHealth application.”
Meanwhile, Herzog says innovations in technology, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) will continue to drive mHealth capabilities. He says: “With the arrival of mobile broadband technologies such as LTE, we will be able to transmit very complex patient data such as body scans or even 3D body imaging. This will contribute to increase using medical competence and technology in a much more efficient way and provide high-class care to patients in need.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): José R. De Souza
Quelle/Source: Khaleej Times, 19.03.2011
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