Is mHealth “Big Pharma’s” Nemesis?

Marketing study after marketing study shows mobile is the future for all industries – “big pharma” included. But marketing study after marketing study also shows drug companies fall far behind in making their Web sites compatible with smartphones, tablets and other devices.

One-third of Web sites belonging to 150 leading medicine manufacturers are optimized for mobile, concludes a study by the nonprofit organization Digital Health Coalition.

Ephraim Schwartz at Healthcare Payer News reports there are negative financial implications stemming from mobile sites that are overly consumer-friendly and offer so-called digital therapies. Such therapies represent a form of interconnectivity in the healthcare field known as “mHealth.”

mHealth has gained so much ground recently that it has spawned a summit that brings together a global delegation of healthcare professionals from hospitals, IT offices, schools and labs. Their goal: to create a medical-delivery paradigm that shifts the focus to consumers through advances in technology.

“You can imagine how mHealth projects get killed inside the pharma company when the mHealth team presents a solution that allows patients to use less medicines for managing their disease,” analyst Lars Kurkinen, of Berg Insight,” told Ephraim in an article titled “Big Pharma’s long road to mobility.” “Cannibalizing your core business is not good for the bottom line, at least in the short term.”

Applications within mHealth include data collection clinicians and communities, sharing statistics with patients and practitioners and monitoring of vital signs and other conditions in real time.

“Healthcare is the wild frontier in wireless technology,” according to mhealthsummit.org. “mHealth’s capacity to deliver healthcare responsively…to influence both personal and population health is, in a time of global healthcare crisis, fundamental to the future of human health.”