LIVE FROM GSMA-mHA MOBILE HEALTH SUMMIT 2012: Keynote representatives from the mobile industry closed this year’s event agreeing that it is time for the mHealth sector to adopt a commercial mentality and ramp-up deployments.

Chris Locke, Managing Director of the GSMA’s Development Fund, and Maruis Conradie, Executive Head of Strategy Planning at Vodacom, both noted that the issue of ‘scale’ had been the main talking point at this year’s Mobile Health Summit. “There are still a lot of barriers to scale,” said Conradie. “But you have to take a long-term view on these things. Things take time. At last year’s event the main disease was ‘pilotitus’ – too many pilots, not co-ordinated, not scalable. Etisalat this week said ‘Let’s just get on with it’, and I agree with that approach.”

Locke took the same view. “We will work with regulators and do all we can to speed up things, but we also need this ‘Let’s go on with it’ mentality.”

Both speakers also stressed the need to make mHealth services as simple as possible to use. “It’s our job to remove the complexity from the end user. If we remove complexity we will get scalability,” noted Conradie. And Locke pointed to huge progress in the areas of consumer wellness – such as apps that enable users to take responsibility for their own health by measuring distances run, or other cardio functions. “Yes we can use mHealth to manage chronic diseases but one of the wonderful things we can do because of the ubiquity of mobile devices is to encourage people to lead better lives and use these apps.”

Locke closed the event by confirming that next year’s show will be held in Barcelona, with exact dates and details to be confirmed.