The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 Issue 1 (February 2015) | Page 25

From Pilot to Take Off: Watch mHealth Fly in 2015

From Pilot to Take Off
Watch mHealth Fly in 2015
Article by Chris Watson

huge financial burden to the healthcare provider and the vendor.

Finally, mHealth is on the agenda. Slowly, but surely, the industry is waking up to the fact that, rather than being a fad, or a flyby-night trend, mHealth is here to stay, and is actively helping
healthcare companies which are striving to deliver ever more
cost-effective care and improve health outcomes.

Building a robust solution
Before a vendor chooses which solution it will roll out with
across borders, it must examine its own capabilities. Most apps
will submit data back to servers, but can these servers deal with
these small packet information sent back to them from each time
zone? Can they cope with 10,000 responses loading on a server
each morning? Even if they can queue up the information, will
it be processed before the next set of data from another country
is due to come in? Again, we reach a tipping point.

Across countries and continents mHealth is utilising mobile
technology to engage with patients both in clinical trials and
real-life situations. mHealth is revolutionising both patient
engagement and adherence to healthcare regimens.
Preparing to scale-out
A study by Cambridge University researchers, in partnership
with wireless networking vendor China Mobile, found that
mobile health devices and apps have a far greater reach than
previously thought1. The challenge for the industry is how to
harness this opportunity to scale out.
Until now, we’ve generally seen cross-border mHealth programs
piloted, before they’re scaled out. However, these pilots have
often come to an abrupt end because of lack of funding and
an inability to properly evaluate data, leading to frustration and
dead ends.
Certainly, scaling out a pilot mHealth program into a multinational full patient support service isn’t simple, and many vendors
can underestimate the associated challenges. But what are the
key considerations and challenges of rolling out pilot self-management solutions into full scale cross-border programs?
Delivering mHealth programs across borders presents unique
challenges. The multitude of varying and complex regulations
and differing patient requirements for the precise type and form
of mobile and digital technology to be applied requires providers
to be highly adaptable, and to have strong regional knowledge.
Key considerations: the numbers game
Let us look first at the background architecture of a potential
cross-border mHealth solution, and ask some key questions.
Can it cope with different elements such as regional settings and
date formats, different grammar and punctuation? Is it referencing the relevant time stamp? In short – can the back-end
cope with scaling a service from, for example, moving from a 1
country implementation, in 1 language, engaging 1000 patients
to a 10 country implementation, using 15 languages for over
100,000 patients?
The quandary here is that if a vendor builds several versions of
the same app, so there is in essence one app per country, then
maintenance costs become prohibitive, requiring large teams
to work on these multiple country specific roll-outs. Considerations such as operating system upgrades across all platforms
would have to be included in the budget, and this can become a

To test that an mHealth solution will provide the data it should,
a vendor must challenge the back-end architecture before launch
and check that all the correct mechanics to handle cross-border
data are in the system.
In a real world situation, a robust support mechanism for the
mHealth solution is