Rob Flippo is CEO of MobileHelp. For the past 16 years, he has worked in both start-up environments as well as Fortune 50 companies, holding executive roles at Motorola, Boca Research and Emergin Inc. He is a current member of the Board of Directors of MAMA, the Medical Alert Monitoring Association. He holds an MBA from the University of Miami and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Florida and has completed coursework in business management at Harvard Business School. He also holds 7 U.S. patents for communications systems.
Q. What's the one promise of mHealth that will drive the most adoption over the coming year?
A. The old expression "cash is king" is an apropos phrase to discuss the promise of mHealth as well as its rapid adoption. According to a recent article in the LA Times, personal, business and community healthcare costs have continued to rise, at degrees incongruent with increases in income.
The article cites a recent survey by private health insurance exchange eHealth Highlights, which reported that more than 6-in-10 people say they're more worried about the financial effect of expensive medical emergencies and paying for healthcare than about funding retirement or covering their kids' education. And the Commonwealth Fund reported that annual increases in work-based health plan premiums rose three times faster than wages from 2003 to 2013.
All of this has put pressure on technology companies to deliver solutions that can help consumers and healthcare providers manage those costs – much of which comes down to better management of healthcare at the patient level. If patients have the tools to manage their own care under the guidance of a physician, cost savings can be realized throughout the care continuum.
The promise of lower healthcare costs – whether from reimbursements from insurance companies around healthy habits tracked with an activity tracking device or increased reimbursements from Medicare around telehealth services – should definitely drive adoption in the next 12-18 months.
Q. What mHealth technology will become ubiquitous in the next 5 years? Why?
A. While the Health IT space has seen a massive influx of new technology in the form of wearables, apps and other devices, the foundation for them – telehealth and telemedicine – is in older, proven technologies. What is rapidly becoming ubiquitous, and will continue to do so, is remote biometric data collection, enabled by smart Bluetooth or BLE.
We are not far from a future where any device we purchase for purposes of managing our health, from weight scales to blood pressure cuffs to glucometers, will automatically upload our data to a cloud location we designate and have ready access to. With seamless integration of devices and data collection, patient control of their own data will occur as effortlessly as simply stepping on the scale each morning. The difference will be that instead of trying to remember what one weighed three days before, that data will be tracked and trended on an app on one's phone, tablet or computer.
Q. What's the most cutting-edge application you're seeing now? What other innovations might we see in the near future?
A. As a good segue from the previous question, the data that consumers and patients will collect and are already collecting every day has promise for healthcare providers to analyze and solve future problems – for that specific patient or for a population of patients with the same diagnosis.
Collecting ongoing data from a broad and substantive group of patients holds significant promise around helping healthcare providers create care plans to address population health management goals and initiatives.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend will likely die out or fail?
A. In looking at trends that have endured to become proven methodologies in long-term health management or the treatment of disease, it is clear that devices and apps that do not tie into the broader picture of patient health simply don't make it in the marketplace long term.
Devices and applications are only as good as the system they plug into; if I have a device that tells me I walked six miles that day, that's nice, but if I have a device that not only tells me I walked six miles, but also how that compares to the previous day, week or year, and further – how that is allowing me to address the goals my physician has for me around exercise related to my pre-diabetes diagnosis, that kind of device has staying power.
Q. What mHealth tool or trend has surprised you the most, either with its success or its failure?
A. When we look at the potential that mHealth devices have for addressing chronic care conditions, the slower adoption rates have surprised me. That said, as technology companies get better at producing devices that tie into those broader pictures of patient health I mentioned earlier, I expect we will see increased traction.
We are already seeing that to some degree among chronic care populations. In fact, of all wearable users, those with a chronic condition are – to the tune of 60 percent – more likely not to abandon them, and to continue to work with the technology in the long-term.
As we make those devices even more relevant to their conditions, from sharing data with physicians to delivering daily care plans based on data results, I expect there will be a dramatic uptick in adoption.
Q. What's your biggest fear about mHealth? Why?
A. The only fears I have around mHealth are related to our ability to provide the technology that patients and healthcare providers need, with access. Reimbursement around telehealth and other mHealth technologies has been so slow that it has become prohibitive to solving many of healthcare's greatest challenges.
That said, we are starting to see a large amount of new legislation around telehealth and a much greater investment from employers, insurance companies and other payers. My hope is that will continue to be the case, and patients will have more access to those cost-saving technologies.
Q. Who's going to push mHealth "to the next level" – consumers, providers or some other party?
A. At MobileHelp, we sell directly to consumers, and have therefore been privy to the way in which consumer demand works its magic in the development and implementation of new technologies.
Consumers have driven the technologies behind the banking industry, where just a few years ago if I wanted to deposit a check, it would have required a trip to the bank. Now we have access to those same products and services from an app on our phones.
For that reason, I would suggest we will see the biggest push from consumers, who recognize very quickly that the data collection they are doing with their devices and apps has the potential to help them and their healthcare providers chart new courses in health management.
Q. What are you working on now?
A. One of the most powerful things we've learned from working with Honeywell Life Care Solutions is that the key to maintaining long-term wellness is consistent and diligent attention to aspects of health that most of us only think about once or twice a year – when we go to the doctor's office. Our weight. Our blood pressure. Those little markers or identifiers of health that tell us so much about ourselves.
This year, we looked to expand on our proactive offering and announced a new service called MobileVitals, which allows people to track and monitor their vitals. From a purely definitional standpoint, MobileVitals is a "telehealth-lite" solution, which means it allows people to self-monitor their vitals, as opposed to having a clinician involved in the biometric monitoring and analysis process.
Many of our customers struggle under the weight of chronic illnesses, from diabetes to heart-related diseases. And they want the tools to manage them. So that they are managing their disease and their disease is not managing them.
In our drive to think long-term about how the way we provide health solutions to consumers, we've looked at chronic illnesses and the way they've driven the consumerization of health solutions and devices. And will continue to do so. As a $2 trillion dollar industry, addressing the issue of chronic conditions has the potential to radically reshape a large portion of our healthcare system.
We are currently involved in several healthcare provider-based pilot programs to determine how our products can best fit within the scope of the healthcare provider channel.
But at the end of the day, the proven technologies tell us that if we give patients the tools they need to engage fully in their own healthcare while simultaneously giving healthcare providers the tools they need to more effectively interact with larger patient populations, we will be able to enact real change in the long-term health of a much broader patient population.
Previous installments in our mHealth masters series:
