Knowledge@Wharton Podcast -
C. William Hanson, III, author of 'Smart Medicine: How the Changing Role of Doctors Will Revolutionize Health Care', director, surgical intensive care, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, interviews Eric Topol, author of 'The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution will Create Better Health Care' and also cardiologist, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and co-founder of the West Wireless Health Institute in La Jolla, California: Access the interview here.
Trish's Comment: The podcast is a great opportunity to hear Hanson and Topol, both greatly experienced doctors with a common vision of the future of medicine, discuss and review
Topol's latest book, 'The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution will create Better Health Care', published on February 12th of this year.Dr. Topol explains in his book how medicine works today, where treatments are based on statistics and probabilities, not the individual. Digital medicine, which would be possible today if it were not for the medical community's profound resistance, has the power to change this through the use of wireless sensors, genomics, imaging and electronic health records.
For the first time we can capture all the relevant information from each person to enable precision therapy. In Dr. Topol's words: 'This is a new era of medicine, in which each individual can be near fully defined at the individual level, instead of how we practice medicine, in which each individual can be near fully defined at the individual level, instead of how we practice medicine at a population level, with mass screening policies for such conditions as breast or prostate cancer and use of the same medication and dosage for a diagnosis rather than for a patient.'Listening to the interview will give you a taste for Dr. Topol's views and proposals and, if you are like me, it will leave you wanting to learn more!
The O2 Wallet launched in the UK on April 26th. O2 described it as 'A seamless and secure digital wallet service that will deliver the benefits of mobile money to more UK consumers than any other product or service currently available.'
It is available to all UK consumers regardless of carrier or bank on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android and BlackBerry.The Wallet combines four functions:
Money Message: Enables consumers to securely transfer up to £500 from a bank account or Visa pre-paid card to any UK mobile phone number as easily as sending a text. Both, the sender and receiver, need to have an active O2 Wallet.Shopping:
A comprehensive barcode and search engine function compares the prices of millions of branded goods from more than 100 online retailers and allows the user to make purchases directly from their phone. This function includes daily discounts and deals. Phone as Wallet: It enables consumers to digitise their existing debit and credit cards making it quick and easy to pay for things via their mobile. Money can be loaded onto the Wallet via a debit card, by receiving a Money Message or with cash at more than 30,000 locations including O2 stores, PayPoint and epay retail outlets. Transaction history can help the Wallet owner keep track of spending.Money Account Card: The Wallet offers both a virtual and a physical card based on a Visa prepaid account. The cards are ideal for on-line and off-line transactions respectively.
ReviewSetupThe O2 Wallet can be used by any consumer with a number of mobile phones (iOS iPhones and iPads, Android and BlackBerry devices) regardless of their service provider. I have an iPhone running on the '3' network. As far as I could tell, I did not experience any constraint, limitation or additional burden compared to O2 customers. Having said this, the setup itself was slow and complicated because:
I needed to setup four different passwords - with different requirements - that I was then asked to enter multiple times during the setup process, making it rather a laborious task. One password is to access the wallet, another to 'keep it safe', another to access the Money Account and yet a fourth one to authorize transactions.
Each credit / debit card entered was checked via 'Verified by Visa'.Each account entered was checked via a small money transfer made by O2 that included a unique code I then had to enter into the phone.Any error I made in setting up a card or account sent me back to the beginning of the setup.
All in all, setup took well over an hour although I did not enter all my accounts & cards. All the passwords and checks may be necessary to comply with security requirements set by banks and credit card companies and perhaps help customers overcome their safety concerns. At the same time, it would seem that O2, along with all other mobile wallet providers, will need to innovate in order to help customers get over this first hurdle in mobile wallet adoption.
As shown in the presentation above, the app itself is very clean, well designed and very easy to use. It works exactly as advertised but the user will quickly realize its shortcomings:
Lack of NFC is a major issue since it, effectively, precludes you from using your phone to buy off-line. O2 will include NFC capabilities in the wallet at a later stage, probably once it feels the infrastructure (contactless POSs and NFC-enabled phones) is in place. Meanwhile, the carrier mitigates this issue by linking a physical card (a pre-paid Visa card provided by O2) to the wallet. This card can be used to pay at stores and also to withdraw money from cash-points. Nevertheless, needing a physical card to buy at the high-street (even in those locations with contactless POSs) feels a bit clunky.Vouchers are a welcome feature but, until they are better tailored and personalized to each consumer, its essentially the same as offers you could get from Groupon. O2 needs to improve this capability in order to differentiate itself.The scanning function is a very good idea but the technical implementation is far from perfect: It has great difficulties pickup small barcodes and it often misreads the larger ones.'Money Messages' are a good idea, although the same functionality can be achieved via PayPal and PingIt. The main drawback is that the receiver needs to have an O2 Wallet installed. This means that they will need to go through the painful setup described above to receive the payment.From TechCrunch by Sarah Perez: DrChrono, a startup focused on bringing medical records and more to the iPhone and iPad, is announcing a big update today which introduces mobile payment feature to its platform, as well as a new way for physicians and patients to access their health insurance information from mobile devices.
Continued.
Trish’s Comment: Ever since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was signed into law to promote the adoption and meaningful use of Health Information Technology (HIT), HIT firms have experienced significant growth.
Particularly, this has been the case for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Companies thanks to the EHR Incentive Programs, which specifies that each physician within a practice can qualify for $44,000 in Medicare Incentives or $63,750 in Medicaid Incentives for adopting a Certified EHR.
This is the main reason behind the explosive growth experienced by innovative small startups in this area, such as DrChrono and Practice Fusion. What is DrChrono and why has it caught my attention?DrChrono is a freemium SaaS solution for doctors that is built on top of Apple’s iOS platform. It offers an online service and iPad app that doctors can use to schedule patient appointments, write or dictate notes via audio, take pictures, write prescriptions, enable reminders, access lab results or input health records. It is experiencing strong growth going from 5,000 users during the summer of 2011, to 15,000 at the beginning of 2012 to around 23,000 this month. The best way to get a feel for DrChrono is to review the following short video.