Healthcare is an industry driven by robust clinical and health economic evidence. The strength of evidence supporting a particular product or service has a direct correlation on the reporters ability to use that information to:

1)      Advocate clinical use of the product and/or service;
2)      Motivate for reimbursement discussions;
3)      Negotiate pricing strategies; and
4)      Develop risk sharing agreements.
 
Evidence drives these market access components critical to ensuring that innovative and potentially disruptive Mobile Health products achieve their stated end goals of improving health outcomes and reducing the total cost of health care.
 
Having said that many commentators in the evolving Mobile Health space are becoming increasingly vociferous about the lack of strong supportive evidence. For example, the EU recently published a report on ICT and Ageing that stated: “A review of more than 600 publications, each claiming that tele-medicine is cost-effective, concluded that ‘It is impossible to assess the extent to which tele-medicine represents a sensible priority’ for health investments”.
 
Understanding this chasm that needs to be bridged for the successful evolution of the Mobile Health sector, stakeholders need to move beyond simply proving impact and towards being able to prove both impact AND cost. Traditional study designs to prove impact and cost are in themselves costly and time consuming. Medical device and pharmaceutical product lifecycles are typically 10-20yrs and companies can afford the 3-5yrs required for robust clinical trials. Unfortunately, Mobile Health technology has a significantly shorter lifecycle and 3-5yrs for a clinical trial are unrealistic and not economically viable.
 
To this end, the mobile industry to date has not engaged sufficiently with health care researchers and funders to develop quasi experimental study designs as robust as traditional design types.
 
One such conversation that is taking place at the moment is being led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) looking at alternative methodologies for gathering and presenting Mobile Health evidence. What should event organisers be looking at and looking for?

Craig Friderichs, GSMA Mobile Health Programme