LIVE FROM GSMA-mHA MOBILE HEALTH SUMMIT 2012: A new study by the GSMA says there is increasing demand for mobile health services and predicts the market will be worth US$23 billion by 2017. The new study is entitled “Integrating Healthcare: The Role and Value of Mobile Operators in eHealth” and was released today at the Mobile Health Summit. The study is supported by data from the GSMA mHealth Tracker, featured on Mobile Health Live. To read the study, see here.

Interest in mhealth is growing as patients show an aptitude for receiving healthcare outside of hospitals and clinics in locations including their own homes. Mobile operators are also developing capabilities to serve the wide e-health market, says the study. These include holding medical records and images in the cloud as well as providing health information exchanges. The larger e-health market could be worth up to US$160 billion in 2015, it says.

The past few years have seen mobile operators delivering healthcare solutions which in the past would have been provided by traditional systems integrators but now there is evidence of operators moving into ehealth, says Chris Locke, Managing Director of the GSMA Development Fund. “Today operators have evolved and are best placed to deliver the solutions addressing the issues that the global healthcare industry faces by lowering costs and making healthcare more accessible,” he said.

Central to operator strategies in this area is their business integration capability ,as shown by their roles in areas such as cloud computing enterprise collaboration, M2M integration and integrated payments, which can all support clinical and operational processes in healthcare.

The GSMA also highlighted the role of its mHealth Tracker in cataloguing mhealth deployments which is available at Mobile Health Live. The tracker provides information on more than 600 mobile health products and services.

Also today the GSMA has released two new studies into health hotline services in emerging markets and using mhealth to support universal health access.