M-HEALTH By PHARMAGEEK

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After decades as a technological laggard, medicine has entered its data age. Mobile technologies, sensors, genome sequencing, and advances in analytic software now make it possible to capture vast amounts of information about our individual makeup and the environment around us. The sum of this information could transform medicine, turning a field aimed at treating the average patient into one that’s customized to each person while shifting more control and responsibility from doctors to patients.

The question is: can big data make health care better?

“There is a lot of data being gathered. That’s not enough,” says Ed Martin, interim director of the Information Services Unit at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “It’s really about coming up with applications that make data actionable.”

The business opportunity in making sense of that data—potentially $300 billion to $450 billion a year, according to consultants McKinsey & Company—is driving well-established companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems. It’s feeding the rising enthusiasm for startups as well.

Venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as the corporate venture funds of Google, Samsung, Merck, and others, have invested more than $3 billion in health-care information technology since the beginning of 2013—a rapid acceleration from previous years, according to data from Mercom Capital Group. 

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Today's mobile apps are helping diabetics aggregate blood sugar and nutritional data from multiple platforms and devices and logging data into central portals accessible anywhere, according to Steve Robinson, general manager of the Cloud Platform Services Division for IBM.

The apps and snap-on smartphone monitoring devices are letting physicians integrate biometric data from wearables into patient data and analyze patient data at fast speed, Robinson writes at InformationWeek. The benefits are just as extensive as the functionality being developed, he says

The gains include everything from simplifying records and improving doctor-patient conversations to gaining a holistic view of a diabetic's health. Doctors can "crunch and analyze patient data at rapid speeds to help identify patterns and predict future health and treatment needs," he writes.

"Mobile apps can help diabetes sufferers get ahead of their symptoms and live healthier, more carefree lives," Robinson says. 

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Diabetes tools have ranged from providing smartphone coaching that is helping diabetics living in low to modest socioeconomic communities manage their disease and improving their health, to a wearable, automated bionic pancreas for continuous glucose monitor and a software algorithm, according to a study at the New England Journal of Medicine.

In addition, mobile monitoring of diabetic employees can save more than $3,000 a year in healthcare costs, half of the average annual medical insurance cost for workers diagnosed with diabetes. 

Today's tools and cloud-based capabilities are reducing those costs while also driving innovation for disease management, Robinson says.

"Using cloud services, combined with the ease and convenience of mobile, new methods of managing this disease are being brought to patients around the world," he writes.

For more information:
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Via Celine Sportisse, DIRECT MEDICA by Webhelp, dbtmobile, Giuseppe Fattori, eMedToday