mHealth in the Enterprise Set to Explode

The rapid adoption of smartphones and now touch-screen tablets (e.g., iPad) by clinicians will trigger enormous growth in the use of mHealth Apps within healthcare enterprises, with the market for mHealth in the enterprise projected to reach $1.7B by end of year 2014. Similar to the hockey stick growth for mobile shown in the slide by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker in last week’s post, the mHealth App market will see a similar trajectory as healthcare enterprises strive not only to meet physician demands for mobile access to clinical information, but seek to improve workforce efficiencies in preparation of future healthcare and payment reform.

These findings and quite a bit more are part of Chilmark Research’s latest report that is being released today: mHealth in the Enterprise: Trends, Opportunities and Challenges. The report is the result of roughly three months of dedicated research by lead analyst Cora Sharma who has interviewed numerous leading adopters of mHealth Apps (Beth Israel Deaconess, Children’s Hospital Boston, UPMC and others) as well as both traditional HIT vendors, best-of-breed mHealth vendors and consultants.

While this report has plenty of charts and figures providing details as to what mHealth App categories will see the strongest growth in the healthcare enterprise and just how big those specific App markets will get, one area that will reach saturation in the very near future is medical content. Companies such as Epocrates, Medscape and Skyscape have been providing this capability for a number of years to physicians and we peg current adoption and use north of 60%. By the end of 2013, this market will reach saturation. This may partially explain Epocrates’ acquisition move yesterday, picking up Modality for $13.8M. Modality will provide Epocrates with critical relationships to many health content publishers and further solidify and strengthen its position in this market. But of Modality’s some 140 iOS-based Apps, only half are heath and life sciences related. Might Modality provide Epocrates the opportunity to expand into new markets now that the health content market is reaching saturation?

But we digress as health content Apps are strictly physician-driven – they do not connect into the enterprise’s health information systems (HIS) and are of limited value to a healthcare enterprise. What is of value to an enterprise is providing physicians with immediate access to the information they need to deliver the highest quality of care in the most efficient manner. This report specifically targets those enterprise mHealth Apps that link into a healthcare enterprise’s HIS including EHR, CPOE, eRx, CDS and Charge Capture. Providing physicians mHealth Apps that will enable them to deliver higher quality at the point of care will rapidly become an important competitive differentiator as healthcare enterprises look towards not only meeting meaningful use requirements and structuring themselves for payment reform, but also improve internal workflow leading to higher efficiencies and more competitive positioning in the broader market.

John Moore blogs regularly at Chilmark Research.