“This brings us to the one of the biggest challenges in mobile Health : its ability to scale up. There is tremendous amounts of small projects and pilots that are showing great evidence, but everyone needs to move to the next stage”

“Are we all connected ?” , a presentation made by Florence Gaudry-Prekins will give you a good idea on where  we stand in terms of mobile connectivity in general and its role in advacing healthcare worldwide. A particular focus is made on Diabetes and mHealth as the presentation was made during the 2014 Diabetes Education Study Group Annual Symposium. And an important further reading suggestion is brought up: The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Eric Topol. 

Florence Gaudry-Perkins is currently International Director for Global Sector at the headquarters of Alcatel-Lucent. Her current position entails relations with governments, multilateral and bilateral funds, as well as international organizations, an ideal platform to address the economic and social enabling effects of mobile technology and broadband in the developing world.

Her past work in higher education and familiarity with global health has influenced her in being a strong advocate of mHealth and mLearning for health in particular. She believes that global corporations now hold a responsibility in bringing their core technologies, products, services and competencies to form alliances with NGOs, Social Entrepreneurs, Foundations, Governments and international organizations to help develop sustainable business models which can then be easier to scale and replicate across regions and markets.

The video provided further down contains the entire presentation. However,  here are some important citations :

“Mobile -cellular penetration rates are 128% in the developed world and 89% in the developing countries. Its quite astounding, we’ve never in the history of mankind have had a communication technology as pervasive and ubiquitous as this one. It opens up immense possibilities in terms of reaching out and it has great significance in the field of health and education.

More and more people are connecting via mobile phones as opposed to computers. The idea of having an intelligent computer in your pocket is no longer a futuristic vision and we need to get ready for that. It is taking the health world longer to realize this is happening and I think we need to accelerate the movement because this cannot happen without the health world coming on board and seeing the opportunities.

The following important aspects were brought up:

– Smartphones usage is growing worldwide, even in developing countries.

– mHealth projects are conducted worldwide. Some data from the 2013 survey done by GSMA, the association of mobile opereators based in the UK : in Europe about 117 , in Africa 363 projects. We see tremendous innovation coming out of developping countries and it is something to keep in mind.

– The scene on mobile applications is different. As you can see : 3000 to 4000 applications coming of North America, in Europe a little bit less and in Africa only 21. The question is , are they reaching people ? Only the top 5% of the Apps have reached more than 500 000 persons. ”