Healthy technologies

Healthcare now accounts for a significant and growing slice of the global economy, with healthcare spending in the US alone reaching an unprecedented $2.5 trillion in 2009, accounting for 17.3% of the US economy.

While the US may be a very different market from the Middle East and Africa, many of the chronic illnesses contributing to the country’s ballooning healthcare costs, such as diabetes and heart disease, are also common in the Gulf.  The figure also points to a global trend of rapidly increasing healthcare costs, particularly in more developed markets.

Furthermore, with a rapidly ageing population in many parts of the world including Europe and the US, and fast growing populations in other regions including Middle East and Africa, a wide range of telecoms technology looks set to take a central role in improving all areas of the healthcare sector.

From communication between doctors and patients, training of healthcare professionals and the remote monitoring of people recently released from hospital, solutions such as mobile broadband and high definition video conferencing are increasingly playing a role in driving efficiency across the sector.

Rainer Herzog, director of strategy and business development for e-health at Ericsson, points to a number of healthcare solutions that have been developed from wireless technologies for the remote monitoring of patients.

“Probably the most important solution that we are developing in telemedicine is what we call Ericsson Mobile Health, which is an end-to-end solution with which you can perform patient monitoring,” he says.

The system, which is in the latter stages of development, is able to remotely measure various body parameters such as blood pressure, lung function, ECG, body weight and pulse rate and then transmit the data wirelessly to a server located in a hospital or another location where the doctor or healthcare professional can retrieve it. 

The system allows the doctor to see data in real time, and send back certain alarms based on certain thresholds. The person assessing the data can also look back at historical data, and the system can also be automated to detect and alert the relevant people when certain thresholds are breached or in an emergency.

Ericsson expects to have a commercially and medically certified version of the system available in April, which will give the company the opportunity to start medical trials, according to Herzog.

“We have two pilot phases in the framework of a European Union project called Health Service 24 where we used the system with people with lung diseases, pulmonary disease and heart disease,” Herzog says. “These are small scale trials with 20-30 people, lasting five months. If you look at the larger scale implementation – that has not been done yet.”

The system, which has been in development for about three years, consists of a small mobile device, about the size of a small mobile phone, which collects the data wirelessly from special sensors on or in the patient’s body. The device contains a Sim card which collects from the one side and sends it over the wireless network to the server, via GSM or 3G. “It is just switch on, switch off – there is not much the patient has to fiddle around with,” Herzog says.

In terms of path to market, Ericsson is “applying a two-way approach” according to Herzog. The company is looking to work with its traditional client base of telecom operators, as well as healthcare providers and healthcare insurance companies.

“On the operator side, there are more and more who are looking into healthcare because they are in search of meaningful applications,” he says. “This is reflected by the tendency to set up their own e-health departments, which Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange have done. There is growing interest from the operators to work with us.

“The other route to market is to go directly to the healthcare players so there we are approaching mostly hospitals and health insurers. The hospitals are interested in how can they save money by discharging people earlier and monitor them while they are at home – which gives a better quality of life for the patient and less cost for the hospital,” he says.

He adds that health insurers are also interested in making savings by improving patient management, particularly with people suffering from chronic illnesses, through remote monitoring.

But remote monitoring does not just allow hospitals to save money. It also benefits patients and their families and employers, by allowing them to continue to go about their everyday activities. Ericsson’s idea was to mobilise people who may otherwise have been confined to their homes or a hospital ward, according to Herzog.

“There are people getting chronic diseases at the age of 40-45, and you can’t leave these people at home, so we wanted to give them the opportunity to leave home, go to work, shopping, do sports and lead a normal life, and our system allows them to do that because it is fully wireless.”

But with the system being central to the well being of patients, Ericsson has been busy ensuring the security and reliability of the solution. “The complicated thing is to make it waterproof, in terms of registration consistency of communication and data security,” Herzog says.

“You have to work with data buffers whenever communication breaks down, so that communication is not lost, you put it into a buffer and then when the system reconnects again that data is automatically there and broadcast to the servers.”

While many people might expect such systems to be targeted at wealthy nations, Ericsson has already seen significant interest from healthcare providers in developing markets. Part of the reason is that remote monitoring holds much potential for communities in remote areas that are far from healthcare services, and also because of the cost savings and efficiencies it can create.

Leading edge

One reason that many countries in the Middle East could benefit from new advances in healthcare related technology such as remote monitoring is that they have newer network infrastructures than many more developed markets.

Thierry Zylberberg, executive VP in charge of strategic partnerships at Orange Healthcare, says that countries or cities that are “starting from a blank sheet of paper” in terms of ICT infrastructure might be able to build a health infrastructure which is less fragmented than in some of the more developed countries.

He adds that this is especially the case in some of the Gulf countries which are relatively small and can therefore focus on developing modern telecoms networks tailored for sectors including healthcare. This is in contrast to more mature markets that often have legacy systems that can lead to a more fragmented network.