Rethinking the mHealth Value Proposition

Over the past few weeks there have been a couple of thought provoking developments in the mHealth market. The first event was the withdrawal of two recently launched mHealth services by O2 UK on the grounds that there was inadequate consumer demand. The second event relates to Verizon Wireless which obtained FDA approval for its mobile health remote monitoring and personal health data platform.

These developments prompted me to revisit some earlier work I did on the value proposition in mHealth. In particular, I was investigating whether remote monitoring is actually a relatively minor, but necessary, element in the business model. My earlier work focused on diabetes care although I suspect that the arguments carry over to other chronic health conditions.

'Place' as an IoT Strategy

As with the case of ‘cloud computing services’ and ‘big-data’, Internet of Things (IoT) applications [1] have been propelled into the business mainstream as companies have jumped on the latest wave of business-press marketing.

For companies that actually want and need to develop an IoT strategy, however, the lack of clarity in distinguishing between IoT services (based on mash-ups of data from multiple and often un-related sources) and traditional M2M services (which involve connected devices within a narrow and well defined industry vertical) constitutes a source of long term business risk.