Innovations in Mobile Technology for Health

It was during a Skype call that Sangu Delle, an impact investor and African entrepreneur, told us:  "Just two days ago, Ghana reached a 98% mobile penetration rate". Mr. Delle is a large scale kind of guy. His current dream is for his company to become a pan-African provider of healthcare services . . . "the UPMC of West Africa."

The on-campus non-profit I am directing with Nate Jayappa called the Student Consulting International Organization, is currently working with Mr. Delle on an M&A acquisition in Ghana of a range of private hospitals. Now, while there is room for high profit margins and deep market penetration in Ghana's urban areas, hospital facilities in Ghana's rural regions are underperforming.

SCIO's executives and associates are starting to brainstorm creative ways to get health to rural Ghanaians. Though a partnership already exists with Emboka Health Ltd. to provide video-conference diagnostics services, telemedicine (healthcare using mobile phones) is an interesting and revolutionary future option for a place like Ghana.

This past September, the global telemedicine market reached $2.5 Billion. At its core, telemedicine is a way to extend clinical services to make them part of lifestyle consultation. The growth of cheap mobile and smartphone devices, combined with the expansion in access and connectivity, is predicted to enable productivity and efficiency gains and greatly reduce the overall costs of healthcare. This is an issue that is contemporary both for the US (which is currently experiencing mushrooming healthcare costs) and for developing regions (which are much better off with a $3,000 thermal baby blanket than a $20,000 incubator).

Everything, from food distribution (World Concern mobile app tracks distributed food and payments), banking, and agricultural reports is becoming mobile based. Many countries in Africa, in fact, are not only mobile-based, but "mobile-only".

Today's question for other bloggers: what are the impacts of telemedicine on the healthcare industry?


http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/09/18/4272426/as-global-telemedicine-market.html
http://www.giiresearch.com/report/wg239633-telemedicine-monitoring-market-shares-strategies.html