In this post, the Population Health Blog predicts how and why mHealth will be covered by more commercial health insurers in 2016, and why the retail "over the counter" mHealth market outside of insurance coverage will also continue to grow.
While you're reading, consider this simple question: What are the revolutions per minute (RPMs) of your automobile's engine as you ascend from stationary idling to freeway speed?
The Definition of mHealth: "the delivery of healthcare services via mobile communication devices." Other definitions can be found here. Elements include handhelds, wireless communications, software, hardware, networking, social media, sensor technology, apps and cloud-based services. The World Health Organization says it's global and much is still in its infancy.
Three Population Health Blog predictions for mHealth in the United States:
1) 2016 will be a breakout year, because both the savings and value propositions will be clarified.
What does the PHB mean by this?
The ultimate question for health services buyers, payers, providers and patients is whether mHealth technology is:
Substitutive: achieving savings from displacing present or future high cost services,
or
Additive: co-existing with present, or increasing future utilization.
The same is true for many pharmaceuticals, population health programs and the medical home.
2) Faced with the reemergence of unsustainable health care cost inflation, commercial health insurers will deploy today's premium to sponsor tomorrow's substitutive mHealth cost reductions.
Commercial insurers will look for mHealth that is "S3" or Smart, Synergistic and Scalable.
1. Smart: addresses the tailored needs of selected population segments; instead of being all things to all patients, think focusing mHealth on high risk patients with special needs.
2. Synergistic: enhances, not replaces other incumbent resources, such as one-on-one care management or outreach telephony.
3) Scalable: uses the economies of scale to provide a lower-cost service to larger numbers of consumers. As more patients in a select population use mHealth, the cheaper it becomes.
3) But.....Value-driven mHealth will also flourish in the direct-to-consumer, over-the-counter or retail market for three reasons:
1) Consumer notions of value:
Interest in personal wellness, a cultural belief in the pervading merits of technology and the allure of every more innovative gadgetry will continue to outpace the underlying mHealth abandonment rate.
2) As Obamacare acquaints consumers with real healthcare costs, #mHealth will be viewed as a relative bargain.
Comparatively pricey physician encounters, emergency room visits or a hospital stays - especially for Bronze Plan enrollees - will only increase consumer appreciation for mHealth's "over the counter" benefit-to-cost ratio: for a few extra bucks, why not have that weight-loss, blood-pressure, medication-management app or wearable, especially when you already have a handheld smart device and the bandwidth?
3) Some commercial insurers will "cover" wellness #mHealth, not because their actuaries support it, but because their customers (purchasers, brokers and consumers) demand it.
"Coverage" will be in the form of a volume-based discount pricing borne by the consumer, not a value-based benefit covered by the insurer. If it increases customer loyalty/"stickiness," all the better.
Plus there's the mHealth "X-Factor." mHealth sponsors and their allies will collect, sell and use consumer data for marketing and surveillance. The PHB calls it mining and monetizing.
Back to the tachometer: Even though its dashboard displays it, the PHB doesn't know the vehicle's RPMs either. Aside from the use of the tachometer by some car enthusiasts to optimize manual gear shifting, it adds little to car performance or safety.
Yet, it's standard and in the dashboard of just about every automobile being sold in the U.S.A. Could gadgets, wearables, apps and mHealth physiologic monitoring become the healthcare tachometer? Useful to a critical few and standard for everyone else?
So, What is the the Basis of the PHB's Predictions?
Growth potential:
None other than Eric Topol says "Until now, most of the effect of the digital era in the practice of medicine has been confined to electronic health records. But that is about to undergo a radical transformation in the next 5 years." As in $50 billion by 2020.
If you think it's all about "Fitbit" or managing diabetes, think again. How about promoting mindfulness, monitoring medication compliance, home-based high-risk pregnancy monitoring, in-home safety for the frail elderly, heart rhythm management, and home-based "pervasive" monitoring. Plus, mHealth style technology is being used outside of healthcare, such as in the automobile, for elite athletes and to promote safety in high-risk worksites
S3 = Savings
Smart: Here's a just-published JAMA study of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) that showed text-prompts had an clinically relevant impact on blood pressure in a group of select persons with coronary heart disease. Here's an rigorously conducted RCT that showed persons with Type 1 diabetes mellitus achieved better blood glucose control. How about socioeconomically vulnerable patients with diabetes? Or patients with heart failure being discharged from a hospital? The list of special populations with special needs goes on and on.
Synergy - This exhaustive peer-reviewed publication examining the merits of wellness mHealth for weight management, physical activity promotion, tobacco cessation, and cholesterol control shows that there's little evidence that it's better than existing therapies over the long-term. Rather, the greatest promise appears to be in complementing existing interventions. By the way, synergy does not mean overwhelming the system with data, but assisting the system with insight.
Scalable: While economists, policymakers and pundits legitimately worry whether bigger is better for healthcare in general, health system C-suites and boards of directors and their consultants are counting on information technology to drive economies of scale. Papers like this and this suggest mHealth can be a part of that, especially if it can mitigate manpower constraints.
And an easy way to assess whether the insurer really believes that it's sponsoring an S3 initiative is asking whether it pays for a handheld device for consumers that don't have one
Value:
Consumerism? Call it "the quantified patient." Here's a telling survey that shows the abiding faith in health information technology and a lack of privacy concerns.
Bargain? The title of this peer-reviewed paper says it all" "It's like having a physician in your pocket!"
Insurer discounts? The same thing happened to health club memberships.
The X-Factor: CIOs everywhere agree that they're not only apps, but software "vacuuming up data."
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