Full article reprinted from Start Up - September/October 2009
This is the device industry's wireless wake-up call. With all the speed and acceleration of an advancing information technology industry, forces outside of the medical device industry are driving shifts in medical product markets and business models. Those forces include the consumerization. globalization, systematization, and economies of scale created by IT. Wireless medicine enables connectivity between caregivers and patients, continuous monitoring of patients with chronic diseases, and a new paradigm for personalized medicine, one based on the patterns that can be gleaned from enormous volumes of individualized patient data, rather than on blood-based biomarkers. Read more...
Wireless Health: Personalized Medicine Comes to the Device Industry
Full article reprinted from Start Up - September/October 2009
** Medical device companies have been trying to forge together the pieces—from a medical device mind-set—to coordinate the care of patients with chronic diseases.
** They've made clinical advances, but hit a wall as far as the business model of how to get paid in chronic disease management.
** Suddenly, it seems, the world of IT is advancing upon medicine, with all the speed and acceleration of that industry.
** The wireless revolution promises to connect patients to caregivers with new kinds of non-invasive sensors, mathematical algorithms of disease, and cell phones.
** Unlike the disease management initiatives of the past, these new patient management offerings don't add expensive layers of personnel and technologies to the process; and in fact, they promise to cut costs compared with the way medicine is delivered today, by allowing the medical establishment to intervene on a personal level. It's all about technology-enabled personalized medicine.
** Medical device companies will have to rethink what constitutes innovation and how they get paid for it; new business models are required.
The wireless revolution in health care won't just add another gadget to the toolbox of medical product manufacturers. Wireless health is a trend that sees the consumerization, systematization, globalization, and the economies of scale made possible by information technology disrupting the practice of medicine and medical markets. What began, six years or so ago in the hands of medical device companies like Royal Philips Electronics NV, and Medtronic Inc., and CardioNet Inc. as "remote monitoring," a way for companies to reach patients with chronic diseases in their homes, is rapidly snowballing into a new paradigm for improving care, increasing access to care, and making care affordable. This new wave in medicine is being driven by outsiders—by wireless providers like Qualcomm, the cell phone manufacturers Nokia and Apple Computer, MicroSoft and other software companies, and manufacturers of internet networking equipment like Cisco--that are simply leveraging their enormous installed bases to get into new high-growth markets in health care. According to Andrew Thompson, CEO of "intelligent medicine" company Proteus Biomedical Inc., by 2010, four billion people in the world will own cell phones, 50% of them by people that make less than $10 a day. That's an enormous infrastructure for reaching individuals in their homes, and therefore, for targeting chronic diseases.
Proteus Biomedical describes the potential of the field this way, in a company presentation: "What if my cell phone alerted me when my father needed help with his Parkinson's? What if I could monitor my body's reaction to medications in real-time?…What if my pacemaker could also manage my diabetes? What if I could better coordinate my care with my doctors?"
Many new companies have already sprung up to wirelessly serve new consumer wellness markets, with, for example, devices for people who want to monitor their own sleep, count their calories, or make sure their elderly mother gets help if she falls. But many of the newcomers are also pushing into the territories in medicine held by the traditional manufacturers, the pharmaceutical and medical device companies, with new business applications that threaten the old business models.
- Mary Stuart
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Companies mentioned in this article:
23andMe Inc.
CardioNet Inc.
Inverness Medical Innovations Inc.
Biosite Inc.
Itochu Corp.
Medtronic Inc.
NeuroVigil Inc.
OSI Systems Inc.
Spacelabs Healthcare Inc.
Proteus Biomedical Inc.
Royal Philips Electronics NV
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Scripps Research Institute
St. Jude Medical Inc.
Triage Wireless Inc.
University of Chicago
Welch Allyn Inc.
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