The use of mobile technology in healthcare is advancing at speeds that only a short time ago could not be imagined, experts say.
At the 2010 mHealth Summit, held Nov. 8-10 in Washington, D.C., U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra said cloud computing and improved connectivity will help unlock progress and compress the cycle time from idea to operation. Already, he said, examples can be seen across government and the marketplace, and the results “are astounding.”
The mHealth Summit, organized by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health in partnership with the mHealth Alliance and the National Institutes of Health, drew more than 2,000 professionals from the United States and 30 countries to hear from experts on mobile health technology and policy.
At a luncheon keynote, Chopra said questions remain. When it comes to mobility, he asked, “do we have the right necessary infrastructure over the next 10 years and beyond?”
“We need to increase bandwidth and infrastructure,” Chopra said, “but we also need to take our learnings from research and development and think anew about how to use existing spectrum in a more efficient manner.”
“It is important for us to knock down bottlenecks and barriers as they come,” he said.
NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, called mHealth “a growing opportunity.”
Collins, noted for his prior work in leading the Human Genome Project, said, “it’s time to take advantage of the marriage of mobile technology and research.”
“I hope you get the sense of NIH’s commitment to this, which is really quite wide and deep,’ he said.
John Porter, acting chairman of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, said, “science, technology, innovation and research are America’s economic destiny.”
Scott Campbell, executive director and CEO for the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, said mHealth is still in its early stages, but it “offers tremendous promise to change the way we deliver healthcare and perform health-related monitoring.”
In a keynote speech, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said mobile phones could potentially save millions of children’s lives in developing countries. Over the past eight years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $300 million to the FNIH.