Item from MobileBusinessBriefing reporting Head of mHealth Solutions, Vodafone Global Enterprise, Axel Nemetz’s keynote presentation at the GSMA-mHA Mobile Health Summit 2012. “Mobile network operators are looking for scale, but healthcare systems are operating on a national, regional and local level. In the health world, there is no global scale. Healthcare is still in the authority of individual nations in Europe, for example, and that’s why it’s challenging taking mhealthcare to scale.” It reminds one that telecoms operators are used to thinking much bigger than most health care providers. Vodafone aims to drop the ‘m’ in mHealth.
RELATED ITEM: Thanks to Boaz Babai of Aerotel for pointing to the recent GSMA report Integrating Healthcare: The Role and Value of Mobile Operators in eHealth, which also emphasises the role the mobile operators are likely to play in future. Blog item: Global eHealth market to grow to $160 billion by 2015.
Glad to hear that Vodafone want to remove the m from mHealth, but many of us have been calling for the removal of any prefix for health for many years, starting with eHealth and thevarious permutations over the last decade or so. The technology is the enabler, not the product.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RVTMryi48