For over a year now, my worldview has been dominated by issues related to mobile healthcare. When you’re in it as deep as I am, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, to most folks, this is an entirely new field. And like any new endeavor, there are bound to be mistakes made, and wrong (or at least unproductive) paths followed.

I was reminded of this the other day when I came across the article, Healthcare Marketing Goes Mobile. It prognosticated trends in device usage (smartphones lead the way, with tablets close behind, yawn), but what really caught me was a demographic profile extrapolated from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

It wasn’t the data itself that concerned me. Instead, it was the idea that one of the wrong paths that mobile healthcare innovators might follow is one of creating products only in response to market research.

Is the best product really an app targeting 25–29 year-old urban black males with some college, making $50k–$75k a year?

Retrospectives of the life of Steve Jobs overflow with delight and admiration for his rare form of innovation. He brought the world products that, until he introduced them, we didn’t know we needed. (I didn’t know I couldn’t live without my iPad until I had one. Now you’d have to pry it from my cold, dead…etc.) Like another super-innovator, Henry Ford opined, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’”

So the potential mistake I foresee is a company “making faster horses,” in response to polling data. For example, an mHealth developer, acting on the Pew demographic profile, deciding the best product to make is an app specifically targeting 25-29 year old urban black males with some college who make $50k to $75k a year.

I’m definitely not taking the position that market research is useless. My worry is that people will proceed cart-before-horse method and develop apps for a market based on volume (a population responding to a survey) rather than an innovative needs-based (physician/patient insight) concept.

A friend and I were talking recently about a home health monitoring system, an early entry into the burgeoning field of mobile health (mHealth). We both expressed doubt that the product would ever become popular.

My friend said it reminded him of other short-lived tech products he had seen over the years. Like a deck-of-cards-sized device that had a dim green and gray screen on which was displayed (for a modest monthly fee) traffic conditions on the local freeways. Or the cat-shaped input device that would sit by your computer mouse (get it?) and be used – its inventors envisioned – to scan special bar codes in newspapers and magazines, which would direct the user to a web site.

Common to these failed products was their narrowness of application. It occurred to me that, while it may be fool’s game to predict exactly where the mobile health market will go and what specific technologies will succeed, wide acceptance will come only to those products and services that include three key characteristics:

1. General appeal in terms of usability (e.g. GUIs; compatible operating systems).

2. The ability to perform specific, precise tasks to meet the needs of the individual (patient, healthcare provider or both).

3. Connectivity to a central source of comprehensive healthcare information relevant to the condition in question.

If I’m right, it means that a product or service that makes a really big splash in the mHealth universe will be more than just, for example, creating a smart phone app that lets a user track their daily exercise and calories. It will be more than a system that sends a user a text reminding them when to take medication. It will be more than a central database of healthcare information. It will, instead, be all these and more.

Will such a product or service build on an existing platform such as smart phones or the iPad? Without question, some will. But just as the introduction and spectacularly fast acceptance of the iPad seemed to come as a surprise to many, there may very well be an analogous, equally surprising mHealth product being developed right now. It remains my position, however, that whatever system achieves dominance, it will be one that combines these three key characteristics.

Marketing Medical Devices: Mobile health is a catchphrase for almost anything health-related on your smartphone or computer. What does it mean to you? See my guest post on Medical Marcom.

Mobile health (mHealth)’s parallels to cell phone adoption, my guest post on medical device marketing consultancy Medical Marcom.

Summing up the SXSWi held in Austin, TX from March 12-15th I’d have to say ‘opportunity’ and ‘uncertainty’ were the two words that came up the most following the Social Health sessions at this event.

Opportunity lies ahead for mHealth application development and healthcare IT, as pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, considered to be a thought leader in emerging technology trends.   At the end of his keynote interview he turned to the audience and encouraged all the entrepreneurs to seriously consider Healthcare IT for start-up opportunities there.

And on the mHealth app development front John Pettengill at Razorfish rightly pointed out, mHealth apps need to be patient focused not technology focused, especially when dealing with chronic conditions.  Just because coders can pull out lots of charts and graphs from the data doesn’t mean that it will be useful or attractive to paitents.  As for healthcare IT, the best sessions dealing with Health 2.0, EHRs and the huge gray area of how this uncertain market will develop were the #health2dev session moderated by Indu Subaiya and following session on health apps with BJ Fogg from Stanford University.

At one point Professor Fogg asked how many gamers/app developers were in the audience and one lone guy raised his hand in a room of 100+ people.  I’ll be interested to see how many more gamers will make their into this audience next year.  I think there will be many more.