The Suit Magazine

Imagine a woman strolling down a city sidewalk on a clear summer day. She’s diabetic, and begins to feel tired and thirsty. But she can’t tell whether it’s the hot sun or something more alarming—a high blood glucose level.

With the new mobile medical technologies just hitting the market, she may not have to play guessing games with her health.
Just this February, Entra Health Systems struck a deal with the Swedish mobile phone company Doro to produce its MyGlucoHealth service, which is available on their senior-friendly cellphones. Using a small device, blood glucose level readings can be measured and then sent instantaneously via text message to a secure MyGlucoHealth portal. Then the consumer can receive a response advising them on what to eat.

And that’s just one of many new offerings hitting the global market. Jon Burkhardt, an analyst for the healthcare group at Frost and Sullivan, argues that telemedicine is an important new trend. “New technology in healthcare is changing people’s behavior,” he said.

Burkhardt said that the aging baby-boomer generation has embraced this new technology. “Many of these people are using the new health phone in order to make a real change,” he said. “For example, with diabetes, you can use this system to make better decisions.”

In 2007, Burkhardt said, Microsoft’s HealthVault and Google Health introduced their own products to the United States. HealthVault has integrated 170 health care applications, including software to monitor diabetes and another software package that helps triathletes monitor their training and diet.

A report released in February by Park Associates stated that digital health technology and services in the United States will exceed $5.7 billion by 2015, compared with $1.7 billion in 2010, driven by devices that monitor chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes and by wellness and fitness applications.
And the technology has saturated the global market. For example, in January, the French start-up Withings introduced a Wi-Fi-enabled cuff that can take your blood pressure and pulse. It connects to an iPhone to synchronize the data with records kept on a personal page online.

Doctors still recommend that patients come in for regular check-ups—technology should not be a replacement for one-on-one consultations. But these new innovations are promising; they could streamline the way we conduct the business of healthcare in the United States and around the world.

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