Our onslaught of 2013 predictions starts with the Top Five from AT&T, cleverly timed for the mHealth Summit. From their press release supplying plenty of AT&T ForHealth focused examples (and our interpretation):
- A shift from stand-alone “unsponsored” apps to meaningful “sponsored” mHealth solutions (Here come the pharmas, insurance companies and care management companies–now if they will just pay for it and stick with it!)
- Hospitals and other healthcare institutions including payers will begin to move more and more healthcare data into the cloud (outrunning HIT’s ability to secure the cloud, secure internal systems, or backup when the cloud goes down)
- Remote patient monitoring will move from pilots to large-scale adoption (another pilot with telehealth provider Intuitive Health and Texas Health Resources is so 2006)
- Integrated mHealth applications will be created (increased interoperability–here there is some traction as hackathons to develop apps on platforms is becoming actually commonplace; the goal of Continua gets closer)
- Upswing on telehealth to bridge the significant gap between physician resources and patient demand (once again in example muddying telehealth with telemedicine, but overall there is some traction; we can only hope that finally we start getting there in 2013!)