Dear Clients and Friends,
There are over 43,000 mobile healthcare applications currently in the market. As providers start “prescribing” healthcare applications, the mRx (m for mobile) industry is slowly becoming an integral part of medical treatment — enabling patients to monitor and manage their health in ways never before imagined. This in turn has the potential to reduce hospital readmission rates, increase patient satisfaction and motivate patients to better adhere to their medication.
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The U.S. FDA cites industry estimates that more than 500 million smartphone users worldwide will use some type of health app by 2015. In its September 2013 guidelines, FDA announced that the majority of health-related mobile applications pose negligible threat to consumers and as a result, it has no current plans to stop the proliferation of these applications. This is great news for developers and investors in the industry.
Most of these apps perform three broad functions: track, monitor and diagnose. FDA will continue to monitor apps that are used for diagnosis such as urine analysis or a recently released iPhone app that can be attached to an adaptor to perform endoscopy (using the phones’ high resolution camera). The total cost of this app is under $200!
We are excited about the time when prescribing apps and medications will go side by side. That is not too far into the future. More significantly, we see a multi-billion dollar market in the making for small portable devices that connect to smart phones to perform a variety of diagnostic and monitoring functions inexpensively. The impact of better self-monitoring and cheaper diagnostic devices could revolutionize healthcare as we know it.