Last week, leaders from across the healthcare industry met in Cambridge at the World Health Congress’ 3rd Annual Leadership Summit on mHealth. Senior representatives from the private and public sectors came together to explore and share their perspectives and experiences in developing and taking to market mobile-enabled solutions aimed at enhancing relationships with their customers. Three key themes repeated throughout the two-day event.
“Be there or be square”
According to Richard (Dick) Davis, SVP and IT Business Information Officer for Kaiser Permanente, 60 million of the 120 million hits to the kp.org website have come from mobile access platforms thus far this year. Recognized out-of-the-box-thinking insurer Humana’s head of innovation, Tony Tomazic, spoke about the company’s rich customer portal as “merely table stakes” and “only the beginning” of what we’ll see from the industry in the next five years. In addition to being a technology platform, mobile access devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc.) are now the fastest growing of any consumer communication in history. And with more people choosing mobile over PCs as their primary Internet connectivity device, “mobile” has become a developing customer marketing, service and support force that must be reckoned with by any leading health organization. It seems to me the winners will be those who understand and build strategies that support three imperatives: 1) providing convenience to users, 2) enabling back end integration – as real-time as possible – with business and patient-level data, and 3) connecting to “best evidence” at the point of care for providers and patients.
Drive toward a “multi-mobile” channel approach
Whether you’re looking to enable better customer decision-making, provide disease education and management, or place an existing business process into your mobile customers’ hands, it’s critical to keep in mind that customers are fluid, moving between and across offline, web-based and mobile platforms continuously throughout a day, week and month. The options for architecting an ideal customer experience are many, so the need to think fully through the entire customer journey can’t be over-emphasized. From the potential power of a simple one-line SMS text and mobile-friendly web portals that provide 100% of the functionality of a dot-com site, to the development of custom applications linked to medical monitoring devices that enhance physician-patient communication – the need for customer experience understanding and touchpoint design has never been greater.
Balance Innovation and Regulation
On July 25 – just three days before the Congress convened, the FDA issued long-awaited guidance related to its intentions to regulate mobile medication device manufacturing, design and distribution. Heretofore a vastly gray area regarding the line between mobile health apps and medical devices, the rules are now clear. According to the FDA guidance, a mobile medical device manufacturer may include “anyone who initiates specifications, designs, labels or creates a software system or application in whole or from multiple software components. Examples include apps that “log, track and graph manually-entered (keyed in) data that lead to reminders or alarms; act as data viewers for patient education; organize, store and display personal health data . . .; or allow for general dose over the counter (OTC) lookups and use drug labeling . . . .” For anyone researching, considering or actively planning a mobile program or pilot — or otherwise exploring the use of mobile platforms to market to or serve their consumer or provider constituencies – I urge you to look closely at, and socialize within your organizations, these new guidelines, including the full FDA Guidance document and this helpful summary from the FDA and Life Sciences Practice Group of international law firm, King and Spalding. Overall, the mHealth Summit made it clear that great changes are on the horizon for the healthcare industry, but marketers should be prepared to adjust and learn as these changes take place.