Going Mobile: Mobile Health as a Disruptive Technology

Massoud: Disruptive technologies are essentially game changers. These are the type of  technologies that are brewing for a long time and they bring about radical changes in markets. A good example of a disruptive technology is the internet. You can't imagine living without it.

Look at a lot of the companies that were created. Amazon, for example, they have created a whole new set of markets and they've created a whole lot of sellers and buyers and they've made a lot of efficiencies. Disruptive technologies create new possibilities.

As it relates specifically to the health care market, what we believe to be the next disruptive technology is specifically the mobile, smart devices. The data demonstrates that physicians are leading the adoption of smart, mobile devices by a higher percentage even when you compare them to the average consumer.

From one side the new generation of physicians started adopting these devices because: A. Found it more convenient to have a small device in their hand as opposed to five different books. So the market responded to that and started building some of those apps.

You have the growth of internet and wireless networks. The drop in cost memory and processor speed. New innovation in terms of the way you interact with devices. At the same time, total connectivity to the cloud. So you're walking around the small mobile device in your pocket but you've got the help of massive computers that are connected to this mobile device through the cloud.

Physicians usually are mobile. The whole idea of a physician sitting behind a desktop and punching information- it's almost incompatible to a physician interacting and talking to a patient. Now in the past they would hold a notepad or they would hold a small recording device. Now comes a desktop- a computer that has to be plugged into the wall and it's stationary. It's immobile and it requires that you go to that station.  It's not part of you. It's quite erratically different from a tape recorder or notepad.

The emergence of mobile- intelligent, mobile devices that have total connectivity essentially merge the benefits of those old devices and at the same time bring about entirely new capabilities and entirely new possibilities.
And actually, if you think about the investment and the cost that the physicians have incurred collectively in investing in these EHR technologies and measure really their impact on productivity of the physicians. Comparing those numbers to the adoption and utilization of intelligent mobile devices by physicians- it's quite obvious who the winner is.

The new EHRs that are going to have high utilization rate are going to be the ones that are coming in the form of apps. To provide that you also need the cloud infrastructure. So really gone are the days of the old client-server completely. That really puts the death nail on the client server technology which unfortunately today the majority of the software that's being sold and marketed to the physicians are based on that old technology.

Physicians understand what these devices do, what they're good for, what their capabilities are, and now they're making new demands in terms of how these tools need to be utilized effectively and they need to be new apps that will help them deal with what they do on a day-to-day basis which is caring for patients.

And that's not something that's going to be dictated from top to bottom where engineers or designers or managers are going to decide that these software look like this or these devices look like this and this is how they're going to be distributed to the physicians or patients and that's how they can use it. It's really the other way around.

So that shift in terms of demand from bottom-up as opposed to top to bottom is a significant shift. And it's indicative of the theorem that we're putting forth that the mobile devices- intelligent, smart, mobile devices are going to be a game changer in the health care market.