Qualcomm Announces Healthcare MVNO
Vince Kuraitis is burning up the blogosphere with more great posts on his blog. The latest to catch my eye was the announcement that Qualcomm made during the ATA (American Telemedicine Association) meeting this month in Nashville, that they are creating a health care MVNO to be called LifeComm. An MVNO is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator who leases capacity from existing wireless carriers' network, packages it and sells it to consumers under its own brand. A successful example is the Virgin Mobile and their prepaid cell phone service.
Qualcomm is reasonably well positioned for this through their QConnect service offering (numerous posts here) and their recent acquisition of nPhase. A big cost for an MVNO is the back office – the software for managing subscribers, billing, and provisioning devices to the network. Qualcomm's telco industry experience, plus the software that makes up QConnect and nPhase have much of this covered. The second big effort for an MVNO is marketing to build awareness and pull prospective customers into your stores or to your web site.
Vince's post provides a great summary of the deal and lots of links to additional info, so I won't go into the details here (be sure to check out the comments at the end of the post, too). Besides, ruminating on the announcement is more fun anyway. LifeComm will need a big war chest for marketing. In the near total absense of third party reimbursement, they will need to market to physicians (who “prescribe” monitoring like CardioNet for patients) and/or patients and their families (who could pay for monitoring or applications out of their own pocket like MyFoodPhone). In either case, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for marketing.
Working against LifeComm is the fact that carriers have failed miserably with wireless data applications. Carriers have always thought of wireless data as a high profit way to boost sagging ARPUs. Much like they started billing for minutes of talk time, carriers initially packaged data by the kilobyte. It was only recently that carriers have packaged data in unlimited bundles. Ironically, the wireless data service that has kept carriers in the green has been ringtones and SMS text messaging, and not the fancy “location based services” and other glitzy applications they became enamoured with.
Much of the LifeComm business model remains hidden. Will all of LifeComm's applications be LifeComm branded, or will LifeComm provide a platform for third party applications? Will LifeComm provide or enfource interoperability (or at least coexistence) between various health care related data applications? Will specialized phones be required to use the service, and at how much of a premium price? Will LifeComm's rate plans be more attractive than the marginally successful wireless data plans from the regular carriers?
The success of LifeComm will be decided by the answers to questions like those above. The other big question is how big is the market today? If LifeComm launches in mid 2008, will there be a multi billion dollar market they can tap into immediately – and if not, how long can they bleed before they have to close the doors?
Pictured right is a CardioNet monitor shot at last summer's Healthcare Unbound conference in Boston.
Fractal Antennas Superior for Embedded Systems
I came across this company, Fractal Antenna Systems today in the RFID related info-stream. Fractal antennas are both smaller and more powerful than conventional antennas, and well suited for embedded systems like medical devices. Fractal antennas have two basic advantages, they are equally effective over a wide frequency range (conventional antennas' length determines the frequency for which they're most effective) and they don't need adjustment with electronic components, which makes them simpler and smaller. According to this brief history:
up his short wave radio system in his flat in central Boston. The lease stipulated no
antennae on the outside of the building, so he had to be inventive. He
had read Mandelbrots fractal book and got the idea to try out a fractal
antenna. He cut out aluminium foil in the form of an inverse Koch curve
and glued it to a piece of A4 paper. It worked amazingly well. Not
until later did he realize how innovative he had been. In the time that
followed he tested the antenna properties for other fractals, with good
results, and then he founded Fractal Antenna Systems in 1995.
Science has yet to fully understand why
fractals work so well as antennae, but there is progress. In 1999 in
the magazine Fractal
Robert Hohlfeld and Nathan Cohen proved that for an antenna, to work
well for all frequencies, it has to be symmetrical and self-similar.
Over time Fractal Antenna Systems has built up an apparently robust competitive barrier through a number of patents.
Fractal Antenna Systems currently sells and licenses antennas for a variety of demanding applications. Although there is no mention of implantable or patient worn medical devices, this seems to be an obvious application.
Pictured right is a fractal antenna.
USB Drive Security Tools
I noted the other day that fellow blogger Shahid Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy, had a post on a free scanner for detecting the use of USB drives on your network. The tool he mentions is called Endpoint Scan, and has some very powerful features – be sure to read his post (you can see a sample report here).
Today I came across some additional info on USB drive security, a white paper and webinar here.
A potential problem with medical devices is they probably won't be on either your enterprise network or a private network – otherwise, why would you need to sneaker-net a USB drive around? Without a network to “deliver” the scanning tool, you have no means to monitor USB usage. The security tools above are more interested in the unauthorized slurping of data off the corporate network. But, as I've mentioned before, there is also the risk of USB drives introducing malicious code into poorly locked down medical devices or PCs.
I wonder what The Healthcare Guy would suggest for this? Pictured right is the teddy bear USB drive.
Philips and Misys Partner for Home Health Solution
Philips Consumer Healthcare Solutions and Misys have announced that they, “intend to to develop an integrated software platform that enables homecare
agencies to provide high quality care to chronically ill patients,
while benefiting from operational efficiencies in monitoring and
managing their patients’ health status.” (Philips press release) The collaboration will be non-exclusive.
Targeting the home health care agency market, they plan to offer deeper integration of vital signs data and health status
information into the patient record, providing a more comprehensive
clinical review application than is currently available from telehealth
providers today.
Obviously these guys don't doubt the value of remote patient monitoring, regardless of the inconclusive results of past randomized controlled trials of the technology with chronically ill patients.
Pictured right is a Philips customer being monitored at home.
InfoLogix Acquires AMT Systems
Mobile computing and RFID vendor InfoLogix acquired AMT Systems for an undisclosed sum. (Press release)
healthcare mobility and RFID solutions into a multi-million dollar
business,” says Todd Stewart, Vice President of Business Development at
AMTSystems. “InfoLogix’s market penetration and breadth of services
will enable these cutting-edge solutions to reach a wider market,
starting with their existing base of 1,100 healthcare customers.”
Stewart will be joining InfoLogix as Director of Healthcare Technology
Sales.
The acquisition also includes an FDA approved technology
which uses RFID to prevent “wrong site / wrong procedure” surgeries; a
patent-pending, paperless RFID-based chain of custody drug testing
system; and a medication management solution for long term care and
assisted living facilities.
AMT Systems has a hospital customer base of about 400 hospitals.
