Evidence generation is critically important to the future of the mobile health market, agreed participants in a Mobile Health Live webinar today. But not all agreed on the state of that evidence. Professor Stanton Newman, Dean of the School of Health Sciences at the UK’s City University, said he had just finished a review of trials from all over the world that used mobile technology to monitor diabetes patients. Of the 20 trials, he said the majority had less than 100 subjects and most were poorly designed. “We need bigger and more robust studies,” said Newman.  Watch a replay of the webinar here.

However, Carolina Pinart, Head of Remote Patient Management with Telefónica Digital, argued in contrast that evidence already existed for saying mobile health can deliver cost efficiency. She said the mobile operator had evidence from their own large scale trials. And she argued that healthcare industry “cannot wait 20 years” to move ahead with a widespread mhealth deployment. She said the operator looked for positive trends and used those trends combined with figures to convince customers to go forward with deployments.

"Quality of evidence determines the strength of recommendations that WHO can make to a government,” pointed out Garrett Mehl, Scientist with the WHO. Later this year he will publish a review of mhealth evidence for mother and child health.

“I would like to be able to tell you I have evidence but we are are halfway in trials,” said Marco d’Angelantonio, Programme Director for the EU’s Renewing Health. The trials are due to conclude in 2013.  He also noted a tendency for critics to be reluctant to compare trials that are not from the same country. “On that basis we will wait until 2020 [for evidence] and that will be too late. We have to break the tendency that says: ‘Unless you do it in my backyard it’s no good’.”

City University’s Newman has the role of principal investigator with the UK’s influential Whole System Demonstrator trial. Interim findings are already published with the mhealth industry awaiting  publication of the final report which is composed of five articles. One is currently going to press while the other four are under peer review, said Newman.

The participants did agree about the need to define what is included within cost benefits. For instance, a patient who is treated via mobile technology at home saves on transport costs and time by not attending a clinic or hospital. These social costs need to be included in evidence, participants said.

Mobile World Live’s webinar is entitled Mobile Health: Driving adoption through robust evidence generation. A replay will be available soon.