A Taste of This Week’s mHealth Summit Event

This week, we’ll be at the mHealth Summit in DC, which should offer quite a deep dive into the emerging and critically important world of mobile health technology.  I suspect we’ll all learn something new at the event, whose keynote speakers include HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Verizon Wireless COO John Stratton and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Once in a while,  you get to attend an event which is happening at just the right time and drawing just the right people.  As I see it, this is just such a moment. Not only are EMRs and other health IT migrating to mobile devices in increasing numbers, mobile apps are working their way into mainstream use, and we’ve even seen a few mHealth apps approved for use by the FDA.

As an editor covering the show, I’ve got a lovely ringside view of the event, and I’ve been getting fascinating e-mail from vendors for weeks. A few items that caught my eye include the following:

*  Vendor BoxTone is pitching its Enterprise Mobility Management platform, designed to help IT departments provision, manage and support mobile devices and apps. I suspect hospitals aren’t paying enough to corporate level management of mobile devices yet, and if so, now is certainly the time.

* Dr. Peter Tippett, CMIO with Verizon Connected Healthcare Solutions, is co-presenting on mobility innovation in healthcare. And Verizon press  are promising to provide new healthcare mobility use cases for disease management and outline best practices for integrating identity and access management techniques into mobility strategies. I hope to hear first hand what Dr. Tippett and his colleagues have to say.

*The Continua Health Alliance is offering some interesting lectures, including one on the future of wearable mHealth apps, devices and sensors. I’ve always been surprised that these technologies aren’t more widely deployed already, but maybe I’ll learn on Tuesday at the lecture.  I’m also interested to hear what Continua folks have to say about standards in mHealth are shaking out — seems like a conversation worth having, no?

* SAP will be talking about its recently-launched mobile EMR app and its mHealth strategy generally. I’m eager to see how SAP’s existing strategy plays in this arena, which calls for fleetness of foot rather than having armies of developers at your command. Can a giant like SAP compete with nimble little mHealth app shops?  Trust me, I’ll ask.

So, folks, no mere blog item could cover the explosion of mHealth activity gearing up in DC this week, so I’ll leave you with these tidbits. I think this is going to be an exciting show.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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