Look at how happy these couples are. Their happiness is our happiness,

Ted

Thanks for the interesting blog and comments. I am an informatics physician at the Barrow Institute in Phoenix. Somewhat bizarrely, I was aksed to comment on an evolving partnershpi wee have between our institute and the Slim Foundation several weeks ago. There is interst in leveraging telehealth solutions to provide neurorsurgical domain expertise with others in Mexico, but notably the foundation wants to broadly impact the many, not just the few.

My particular focus is patient enablement, how one allows the base of the health pyramid- afterall, there is limitless power if the patient can contribute to their own wellness. Sadly, current efforts are largely focused on the provider- better EMR, rather than better patient diaries. All of these methodolies need to be outcomes based as well.

For me, technology needs to be agnostic to the patient. The front end needs to be something the patient is comfortable with…text, email, snail mail, TV…whatever the patient is comfortable engaging, but the backend needs to monitor, message and aggregate this information. The solution also should incoprorate more than the patient and their direct provider. In particular, there is value in engaging the family and others in the patient’s wellness. For example, juvenile patients with diabetes often view parental involvement as an intrusion, but the parent is worried. The system needs to reach out to the parent when the child is in need of help with alerts.

I am working with a different group of companies than the ones you called out (MSFT, Google, Cisco) in the PHR space as well as connectivity. My sense is our paths are going to converge soon.

Again, thank you for the comments

Alan Pitt, M.D.

And now in a sense I see you, and Kaiser, and Beth Israel, and all of healthcare as my customer. Because if I’m to be valuable in this process, I must ask what would be of service to all of you.

So let me ask: what do you want? How can I, and we the patients, and we the Society for Participatory Medicine, serve you in achieving your goals?

Well thank you for taking the time as expert-in-residence to add information from your experience. I and others are obviously impressed with the possibilities you are starting to make real.

I’d be happy to talk more and to share information here about that, and refer people to learn more about your work; as I said in a previous post, there’s a lot we can learn,

Ted

This is Rodrigo Saucedo from the Carlos Slim Health Institute. In your last entry, you presented six differences between mHealth and eHealth. One of them, which I particularly agree with, is Dentzer’s vision that the forefront of mHealth is in the developing countries, out of which Mexico is one of them.

Regretably, this comment overestimates the impact of mHealth in Mexico as mHealth solutions are not part of public policies yet; the Carlos Slim Health Institute, through strategic partnerships, has done the development and operation of these solutions. Our concept is based on the idea that the solutions must be directed to the end-user if a solution is to succeed. For that to be a reality, we have associated with Voxiva, one of the largest global health technology providers, and América Móvil, leader in the provision of mobile services, to develop a technological platform in which the internet, the mobile phone and the fixed phone interact.

We are scaling these solutions through public-private partnerships: Johnson&Johnson, West Wireless Health Institute, Qualcomm and Jumex (one of the Mexican leaders in the beverage industry) and state and municipal governments.

We have focused our solutions in three major public health problems with which governments and the population are struggling with:
- First, chronic diseases. We have developed a solution focused in changes in lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors; we also developed a solution to promote self-management for those with diabetes, and we are developing a second solution focused in weight control and healthy nutrition.
- Second, maternal and child health. We are working in the development of a solution for pregnant women with continuous interaction through the mobile phone; a solution for primary healthcare workers with an real-time application that has interaction for both the mobile phone and the internet; for those with high risk pregnancies we are working on an interactive home-care health system; finally, once the mom delivers, a solution focused on monitoring the baby’s health evolution with an electronic vaccination schedule.
- Finally, we have developed a solution for those with HIV/AIDS to provide a self-management tool with special focus in emotional health and adherence to the therapy.

For these solutions to become a public policy we need evidence through rigorous evaluations. We are now in the process of doing them.

I’d like to have a further talk with you should you consider it convenient.

Cheers,

Rodrigo