Obama – Raising the cost of Personal Healthcare?

Today should have been a day for celebration, as the US Senate passed the Healthcare bill.  But two strands of it – the device tax and product registry seem aimed to make barriers for the deployment of personal healthcare.

I don’t think anybody would argue against the need for reducing the cost of healthcare.  There are obviously many efficiencies that can be brought into the system, whatever and wherever that system may be.  But most agree that increasing the individual’s focus on wellness is an important foundation to that cost reduction.  To make that happen we need to make personal health devices cheaper and more accessible.

That’s where this bill betrays itself.  Hidden amongst the headline grabbing stuff are two clauses that may well help to slow the speed at which these devices come to market – a tax on each and every device, and a proposal for the FDA or similar body to administer an Orwellian control over what comes to market, potentially stifling innovation.  If this really is a bill for reforming healthcare, that’s a strange route to take.

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Chip Jenga – Playing with Scotland’s Health

Every August I spend a couple of weeks at the Edinburgh Festival, taking in the best Arts festival in the world.  There’s not much to learn about healthcare amongst the 2,000 different productions, but it’s an interesting opportunity to look around the City to see how healthcare initiatives in Scotland are developing.

Scotland is an interesting country in terms of health, as it contains a number of anomalies.  At one end of the spectrum it boasts some of the best examples of Telecare and Assisted Living practice anywhere in the world.  In the middle are some excellent preventative initiatives.  And at the other end it has issues with lifestyle and diet that are propelling its population towards an increasingly unhealthy future

The issue of diet is a long-standing one that starts at an early age.  Whereas England is embracing chefs like Jamie Oliver who are leading high profile campaigns to improve the quality of school meals, Scotland largely ignores them.  If you’re in Scotland at lunch time, you’ll see queues of school kids outside the local chippies and bakers downing their daily intake of carbohydrates as they start on the route to weight related health problems.  For most, lunchtime means a trip to the local obesiary, which is typically Greggs – the chain of bakers who feed a large percentage of the population. 

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Bluetooth is winning the Medical and Fitness Market

Everyone knows that Bluetooth is in their phone and their headset.  What few realise is how many other products rely on it for their connectivity.  Over the past few years I’ve been working with manufacturers and organisations to integrate wireless into their products, particularly in the area of healthcare and fitness.  Having spoken about the current state of play at a recent conference, it struck me that most of Bluetooth’s success in this area is invisible.  The reality is very different, as the recent statement from the Bluetooth SIG acknowledges – Bluetooth is present in over 20 million health and fitness devices.  Market leaders like Philips, Nonin, Polar, Nintendo and Medtronics have chosen it.  That’s not a arbitrary choice, but one that they’ve made for good technical reasons.  To explain why, I’ve written a report about Bluetooth and the health ecosystem it is enabling.  In it I cover the reasons it has achieved its current success and how it is poised to become the standard for all consumer health and fitness products.  I also cover the changing health demographics to illustrate the reason we need it.  To find out why, download the report –

Download “A Bluetooth Ecosystem for Health and Fitness”

bluetooth-the-wireless-ecosystem-for-health-fitness-and-assisted-living.pdf – Downloaded 10112 times – 382.90 KB .

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Two nations divided by a common technology – the Mobile Conundrum

The phrase of “two nations divided by a common language” to describe the differences between America and the UK is generally ascribed to Bernard Shaw.  Looking at a recent presentation on mHealth, it occurred to me that a very similar comment could be coined for the way we use our mobile phones.

The thought that prompted this came from a presentation by Andre Blackman on mHealth.  In it he asked his North Carolina audience the question of “How many mobile phones are equipped with SMS (text) function?”  The answer, which I suspect surprised a number of his audience, was “WOW – 95%”.  It struck me that had I been asking a similar question in Europe, I’d have phrased it differently, probably as “When was the last phone sold which didn’t have SMS?”  And I’d have been surprised to get many audience members suggesting a date any later than 2002 – ten years after the first SMS was sent.

It highlights something which I’ve been aware of for the last ten years – different countries and cultures are developing their mobile usage in different ways.  Multi-mode and multi-standard phones now mean that most of us around the world have the same basic technology in our hands.  Yet the way we use that and the way that our network operators promote it continues to diverge.

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Digital Britain – Enabling Healthcare

Last week Stephen Carter, UK Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, launched the Government’s Interim report on Digital Britain.  I’d recommend reading it – its scope is wide and it contains a refreshing amount of joined up thinking.  The initial press coverage concentrated on its aim to bring broadband to all UK homes by 2012.  That’s a highly laudable aim, but by concentrating on that one conclusion the media missed much of the more promising underlying detail, particularly its relevance to home telecare.

 

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Glow in the dark Yoghurt – it’s the future for Science.

It’s always good to have a heart-warming story to start the year off.  What made this a particularly good start for me in 2009 was the fact that the story appeared in New Scientist.  In their opening issue on 3rd January, they tell the story of the “Rise of the garage genome hackers”.  It’s all about the research on genetic modification that is going on in sheds, garages and bedroom cupboards around the world.  It’s is a largely unreported phenomenon, but signals a growing trend which is the return of the scientific amateur or hobbyist.

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