The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 Issue 1 (February 2015) | Page 9

Digital Health 2015: What Can We Expect?
investigator interaction through Clinpal, a
platform developed by eClinicalHealth.5
As pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers seek to adopt a
more rapid route to market, then the use
of this type of trial will become more
prevalent.
In a similar sign that digital and mobile
components are beginning to play a
greater role in the clinical trial process,
Oracle recently introduced the Health
Sciences InForm Medication Adherence Insights Cloud Service. A solution
that has been designed to integrate the
market-proven “smart pill” system from
Proteus Digital Health, to automatically
send medication ingestion data directly
into the clinical trial database.6
The platform helps researchers more
accurately and efficiently track and manage the use of medication during clinical
trials—a historically laborious and errorridden process. The new solution automates data collection and captures accurate medication ingestion information.
By providing direct and rapid validation
of the quantity of medication a patient
ingests and the time of ingestion, the
service can help health sciences organisations lower the risk of clinical trial failures by identifying medication adherence
issues early, improving dosage decisions,
and enhancing drug safety. This helps to
accelerate trials and reduce costs by eliminating imprecise, time-consuming, and
expensive manual processes for collecting adherence data, such as pill counts
and patient questionnaires.
Pharmaceutical companies, have for a
long time, foreseen the benefits that connected and remote monitoring solutions
will bring to the trial stage of new prod-

uct developments, and it would seem
that the technology is now at a point
where those opportunities are beginning
to be realised.
Greater mobility in telehealth
2014 was a significant year for telehealth
project introductions, and the coming
year looks set to continue this trend.
One thing that we are beginning to see,
is growth in the flexibility of these solutions and services as the technology
employed moves increasingly towards
mobile delivery.
Telehealth and telecare has been around
for many years now, traditionally being
delivered through the use of proprietary
systems that have had limited adoption.
Healthcare providers wishing to introduce a telehealth care stream were, in the
past, required to make significant capital
investments in equipment, staffing costs
and support services in order to deliver
relatively small-scale telehealth projects.
What we now see, is telehealth and telecare services migrating towards implementation using mobile technologies.
Using technology that is already in a person’s home, or in the case of a smartphone kept with someone throughout
most of the day, has made it much easier
for provider organisations to deploy
telehealth and telecare services, and for
those services to be more effectively
managed. There is no longer the significant up-front investment needed to
deliver tele-consulting services. Similarly,
the development timeline has decreased,
meaning services can be developed more
quickly, and in ways that are adaptable to
meet the needs of the provider organisation and the needs of the patient. In the
same way, services can be easily scaled-up
with minimal additional cost to the over-

all project, which allows organisations to
manipulate tele-consultation services to
effectively deal with capacity issues.
What we are beginning to see, is not only
an increase in adoption of F