M-health market to boom, says analyst

A DOCTOR.PHARMACY.gifAnalyst Juniper Research has recently published the report Mobile Healthcare Opportunities: Monitoring, Applications & mHealth Strategies 2010-2014. The report looks at m-health opportunities worldwide, such as patient monitoring, remote diagnosis and even appointment reminders via SMS.

One of the most promising markets is remote patient monitoring using mobile networks and Juniper forecasts that market revenues will rise to almost $1.9 billion globally by 2014. The bulk of early mobile health roll-outs are currently heart-based monitoring in North America, and on this blog we have reported on this market and on the work that Orange has done with Sorin in this specific area. Even by 2014, the US will remain by far the largest market, followed by Western Europe and the Far East (including China).

Juniper has put together a white paper from the report that summarizes the findings. It looks at the potential of different applications to reduce the cost of healthcare and to help solve a "severe health workforce crisis". The World Health Organization  says that there is a deficit of 4.25 million healthcare workers worldwide. One of the quickest wins it identifies is SMS based appointment reminders because it is easy to implement and generates a lot of cost savings. Harder to implement applications include remote diagnosis and health monitoring, both of which have great potential.

Anthony Plewes

After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.