CareSpeak CEO and Founder Srdjan 'Serge' loncar
mHealth Update recently caught up with Srdjan ‘Serge’ Loncar, Founding President and CEO of CareSpeak Communications to discuss the company’s work and the mobile health industry as a whole. Carespeak Communications was started in 2006 by Serge following stints at Songbird Hearing, CDNOW, Pepsi and Johnson & Johnson. Originally envisaged as a mobile handset with healthcare applications for seniors and their caregivers, Carespeak has since evolved into a fully software play focusing on health applications and services using SMS as the main data transfer protocol. The company currently offers 2 products: MediM, a medication adherence and persistence application; and DiabeText, an intelligent mobile phone logbook designed to help the management of Type 1 diabetes. Carespeak are currently developing solutions for the management of hypertension, congestive heart failure and mental health amongst others.
For an mHealth advocate, Serge is cautiously positive. Seeing great potential but also comparisons with the boom of another industry, digital music: “It reminds me a bit of the early days of the digital music industry when business model attempts mushroomed and most of them didn’t work for numerous technological and financial viability reasons…I think that it’s going to be big, but the projected growth will take longer than anticipated.”
Serge notes that the last year has seen mobile health begin to filter into the mainstream with the majority of people starting to understand the concept “when as recently as a year ago people would give me blank looks when I would talk to them about mobile health and CareSpeak”.
He puts this down to a number of factors: the Obama administration’s focus on preventative healthcare, increased interest from the media (CareSpeak’s recent collaboration with the Mt. Sinai Medical Center was covered in the New York Times) and the buzz around new technologies like iPhone apps.
So what is the biggest barrier to mhealth? In Serge’s view the mobile healthcare industry is a complicated one with a vast amount of industry segments shaping it: “In the healthcare system we have the providers, payers, medical device manufacturers, telecoms, consumer device manufacturers, a complex regulatory system, etc.”
This as a result will lead to the prediction of slower growth than has been anticipated. Nonetheless, he believes certain steps could be taken that would accelerate the uptake of mHealth, partcularly in the US. The implementation of incentive systems based around mobile healthcare is one such suggestion. For example, bonus holidays for employees who keep their blood pressure within a certain range or payers subsidising mHealth services according to performance-based measures.
It is also vital the applications developed fit within the everyday workflow; ones that don’t require broad changes to the consumer’s current behaviour. Likewise he strongly believes in the involvement of clinicians in trials, a step which CareSpeak themselves took with their work with the Mt. Sinai Medical Center: “Not only do we need to design around patient’s needs, but we also need to make sure we understand the clinician’s needs”.
Serge also believes “the most sustainable business models are going to develop around applications that collect and provide reliable and actionable data.” As such, companies need to ask themselves certain key questions from the outset: is the market they are addressing large enough? Does their technology work? Is it scalable? Will users use it consistently? Will people be willing to pay for it?
So what about the future of mobile health? “I expect to see a proliferation of new start-ups and technologies and then a big shakeout a few years down the road as it usually happens in cycles of innovation” says Serge. “Given the complexity of the multiple industries driving the growth, I still don’t think it’s totally clear what or who is going to have the largest impact in shaping the future of mHealth.”
Serge’s observation that the mobile health industry is subject to a variety of market forces is an astute one. With such a multitude of factors influencing its evolution it is difficult to imagine quite what shape mHealth will finally take, and in many ways this is what makes it so exciting. Needless to say though, we at mHealth Update will be watching how the industry, and CareSpeak, develop in the coming months and years.