Hospitals and health systems are facing some serious competition for the consumer's attention, and it's coming from payers and employers.

Tom Reid, president of the Reid Consulting Group, calls it a "dangerous game of Battleship." Buoyed by mHealth tools and platforms, payers "are experimenting with being healthcare providers" and lobbing innovative healthcare ideas at their members. Self-insured employers are also getting into the game, looking to find ways to reduce their health insurance costs.

And as long as they're getting their healthcare services, most consumers aren't really going to care who's employing their caregivers.

The solution? Reid, speaking at Sunday's Mobile Health Symposium, part of the HIMSS15 Annual Conference and Exhibition, said providers have to "innovate now so you can keep the hearts and minds of your patients."

Perhaps the best way to gain a competitive advantage is to create a strong telemedicine network that ensures that everyone has broadband connectivity. That's what Reid helped to do in 2006 when he supervised the launch of the Southern Ohio Health Care Network, a 34-county system about the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts together. Encompassing the region's three largest health systems and hundreds of sites, the network has parlayed some $82 million in federal funding into a two-phase, $134 million project to ensure that every home in the rural, economically challenged area has access to broadband services.

And that, he said, means a doctor can send a patient home with the latest in monitoring equipment, or explain how to use a fitness monitor or smartphone app, and know that the data will get to where it needs to go.

To stay on top of the telemedicine pyramid, health systems have to make sure all their devices are connected. At Detroit's Henry Ford Health System, solutions architect Ali Youssef says some 19,000 mobile devices are used each day by more than 23,000 employees in more than 100 facilities over 8 million square feet of Wi-Fi coverage. And that's not including what the patients want to use.

Youssef said it was important to create an advisory council that drew from all of the health system's departments, to avoid creating an "mHealth silo." That committee has to stay on top of a constantly changing landscape, he said, which includes Bluetooth-capable devices, mobile body area networks, WLAN networks and even inside-voice handsets.

"mHealth is more than just Wi-Fi," he pointed out.

It also means categorizing each different type of device and prioritizing them, so that the device in one room isn't failing to work properly because the patient in the next room is watching Netflix on his or her laptop.

At the end of the day, a health system's success lies in something that can't even be seen – a broadband system that reaches everyone, doesn't become overburdened, and delivers data when and where needed.