Telefonica Health Policy

A sneak peek at this week's Mobile Health Summit

Denise co-founded ZATZ Publishing, and has been the managing editor for its magazines since 1997. She was previously the managing editor for a number of Ziff-Davis technology publications.

Nothing Denise writes is meant to be a substitute for medical advice, and shouldn't be considered as such. If you are in need of medical help, please see your doctor.

On Friday, June 3, I attended an advance meeting for the Mobile Health Summit taking place from June 6-9, in Cape Town, South Africa. The United Nations Foundation held this briefing to discuss “how mobile technology is delivering dramatic results in the health field”.

There was a panel of experts on the teleconference, and they presented ways mobile health (which they referred to as mHealth) is changing the way health services are being delivered. They also talked about some of the challenges and early lessons learned from projects in emerging markets.

The players

The experts represented a variety of organizations. Each one spoke for about five minutes about their area of interest and expertise, and talked a bit about what their organizations are doing in the area of mHealth.

Jody Ranck

The moderator was Jody Ranck, Director of thought leadership, policy and advocacy for the mHealth Alliance.

Jody introduced the speakers. He said a bit about the conference’s purpose in response to the critical issues faced by healthcare systems worldwide, including aging populations and chronic and infectious diseases. Mobile innovation in telecom has grown rapidly over the past few years, and innovations are being built upon this growth to provide more cost effective and higher quality care.

According to the press release from the mHealth Alliance:

The mHealth Alliance (mHA) mobilizes innovation to deliver quality health at the furthest reaches of wireless networks and mobile devices. Working with diverse partners, the mHA advances mHealth through research, advocacy, and support for the development of interoperable solutions and sustainable deployment models.

The mHA sponsors innovation challenges and conferences, leads cross-sector mHealth initiatives, and hosts HUB (Health UnBound), a global online community for resource sharing and collaborative solution generation.

The First EU Digital Assembly: a Plea for a ... - Public Policy Blog

Last week we attended the first Digital Agenda Assembly , where a whole range of topics were discussed, and as part of our contribution to the debate, I wanted to look at the issue of a Digital Single Market for Europe.

There is clearly great potential in a Single Market for digital content for Europe – the possibilities for shopping cross-border make a lot more sense (at the moment at least) for downloads, games, apps than they do for fridges, cars or baked beans. It makes no difference if you are buying your app or download from Frankfurt or Finland, and there are no distortions for delivery costs either. Being able to easily shop online for digital goods and services should help consumers see the benefits of the EU’s single market, and help spur growth in other areas too.

While rates of cross-border shopping are currently low , the right approach should aim to build trust and facilitate the shopping process. If consumers know that there are certain rights which are going to be protected across the EU in the same way, then they will have more faith in shopping from other countries than their own. While this is still not a reality, despite the Commission’s attempts to harmonise consumer rights, the forthcoming proposals on a 28 regime for cross-border shopping may provide a useful tool. What makes a difference at the end of the day is the trust by the consumer in the site they are buying from, and while this is not automatically done via a single set of legal tools, it is one step along the way. I also think that the consumer wanting to take advantage of the benefits of the Single Market – the greater choice, lower prices owing to the more competition between retailers – understands the logic of having a set of EU-wide rules which apply.

However, at the moment we still have a long way to go on the digital side: the way in which content is licensed needs to change – at the moment, many Europeans are missing out on content they want because of licensing difficulties in their country. As an example, Hungarians do not have access to iTunes. Allowing consumers access to the content they clearly want is the best way to address the issue of online illicit filesharing as well – monitoring and punishing internet users might actually be self-defeating (as we mentioned in this post ).

The Digital Agenda aims to increase the number of Europeans online, and to get them to use it more. I would suggest that if we can make it easy for them to shop online, then there will be trust  to use other services, such as e-government and e-health services, as a next step. The Digital Single Market is a great lever for the Single Market as a whole, and it is one we should be making easy to pull.

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