When word got out this past summer that Google and Verizon had negotiated a "secret pact" (as one alarmist account put it) to essentially bypass the concept of net neutrality – which holds that all online data should be conveyed at the same speed, regardless of whose content it is – the reaction from bloggers and journalists was immediate and impassioned.
"The End of the Internet as We Know It," blared the headline on the Huffington Post.
"Yes, Google is a Little Bit Evil," announced an article in Mother Jones.
The two companies responded with a joint statement that sought to quell the furor and explain their "shared statement of principles."
The new proposal, wrote Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president of public affairs, policy and communications and Alan Davidson, Google's director of public policy, simply seeks to "protect the future openness of the Internet and encourage the rapid deployment of broadband."
Toward that goal, their framework would support the FCC’s "current wireline broadband openness principles" and make them "fully enforceable."
In addition, however, in order to help make the "broadband infrastructure ... a platform for innovation," the Verizon/Google proposal "would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services," they wrote. "This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring…."
Iltifat Husain, a fourth year medical student at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who's concurrently working toward a masters in public health from the University of North Carolina and who reviews mobile medical technology at his blog, iMedicalApps.com, took notice of that last term buried in those 1,057 words.
As he noted on the blog, "lost in all the buzz" of the net neutrality kerfuffle was a strong indication that "both companies were thinking of mobile health care" as a future beneficiary of any new rules for wireless broadband.
Indeed, "the new front is mobile; that's where the innovation is truly happening," said Husain in a phone interview." And using mobile tech for the "real-time monitoring of events is really where a lot of the research in mobile medicine is being done right now."
For example, Husain cites a couple recent studies. In one, the University of Chicago Hospital’s Pediatric Epilepsy Center is developing a mobile EEG monitor, connected via Bluetooth to a patient’s smartphone, which can brainwave data in real time. In another, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is putting mobile apps to use, analyzing patients' smartphone data to better understand nicotine addiction.
Both are amazing uses of new technology, with a lot of promise.
"The problem then is data," says Husain. "How is this real-time data being sent?"
Will such studies always be conducted using existing consumer data plans? In order for the true potential for mobile health to be unlocked, it would seem to make sense to have more of a robust, dedicated network where such innovations can be unencumbered.
The Google-Verizon deal seems to be suggesting "another avenue for healthcare," Husain says. "They want to differentiate consumer uses" from a sort of parallel network for other uses.
After all, he say, "real time monitoring is going to chew up a lot of data."
And with providers like AT&T trying to ease congestion by capping data plans at, say, two gigabytes and then charging extra for more usage, the problem becomes apparent.
Hospitals are finding terrific uses for the iPad, for instance. But using them to access a patient's EHR uses a lot of data, and taking away unlimited plans "makes it more complicated for them," says Husain. "It's really important that there is bandwidth there – and cheap." That's why this so-called "private Internet" proposed by Verizon and Google – or something similar – could be so well-suited for healthcare.
As Dana Blankenhorn writes on ZDNet.com, "essentially, you’re building health applications into a private network, tracking that network, layering it on the public network, and charging for the extra services and expense. What’s wrong with that?"
