Improving patient experience is at the heart of healthcare transformation (see Exhibit 1). A good patient experience requires healthcare services to be unified, seamless, personalized, and omnichannel. Continuous health status monitoring and reporting are two of the next big developments in improving health outcomes and lowering delivery costs. Incomplete and infrequent patient-doctor communication is a leading factor in misdiagnosis and tardy treatment. A continuous interchange of information between the patient and clinician improves physical well-being and contributes to psychological improvements that come with tracking treatment program progress. We recently caught up with Frank Gulitz, the CIO of Switzerland-based health-tech startup Mobile Health AG, which developed a system for electronically reporting status and outcomes for cancer patients.

Exhibit 1: Patient experience is at the heart of healthcare transformation

Sample: 41 healthcare executives

Source: HFS Research, 2020

Mobile Health’s solution is consilium care^TM, an electronic patient-reported-outcomes SaaS system. It improves symptom progression monitoring for cancer patients and monitors their well-being. It also generates an alert if a symptom is above a critical level, increasing patient safety as well as facilitating patient-doctor communication, especially in the outpatient setting.

The initial focus is on monitoring cancer patients undergoing cancer-related treatments. Because these treatments can have serious side effects, timely identification and management of adverse events is key to influence treatment outcomes. It is critical to reduce patients’ anxiety, especially during treatment.

As part of the overall solution, Mobile Health selected Infosys to set up and manage cloud and infrastructure services and support, security, monitoring, and platform management services across multiple geographies. Today, Mobile Health supports patients in 30 cancer location centers, and it will roll the solution out to Germany in January 2021.

We launched our platform in Switzerland on the 15^th of November and are now actively onboarding clinics and patients. Our target is to achieve 1 million data records as soon as possible to enable our ambitious target of introducing predictive analytics and utilizing AI in healthcare. International expansion of our solution is a further focus point, where we lately signed a partnership agreement with Infosys for the US market.

Frank Gulitz, CIO, Mobile Health AG

“Infosys is partnering with Mobile Health AG on the consilium care^TM platform to refine the quality of care for cancer patients and enable a value-based digital healthcare system through high-quality patient data and value-based pricing. The partnership will streamline the access of the public CSPs to Mobile Health AG’s requirements while offering robust, cost-efficient cloud services, support, and security”, remarks Roshan Shetty, Head of Life Sciences, Healthcare & Insurance for Infosys EMEA

The partnership between Infosys and Mobile Health has the potential to meaningfully impact healthcare delivery

There are several real life and tangible benefits to the Mobile Health AG solution. Health care payers and providers see:

• Fewer ER visits reducing the cost of care: Mobile Health estimates 20% to 30% fewer emergency room visits when their solution is used, significantly reducing overall payer costs. The average costof an ER visit is $1,700, and the cost increases annually. Each year, 650,000 cancer patients receive chemotherapy in an outpatient oncology clinic in the United States. If this solution defers one ER trip per year for half of this population, the savings could reach $6 billion.
• A leading-edge platform connecting healthcare stakeholders: The future of healthcare delivery will be in hyperconnected networks that link patients, clinicians, and healthcare organizations. The Mobile Health platform promises to be a data repository that can handle communication and transaction processing and be the fountainhead for new services and applications. Infosys, backed by its healthcare client base in the US, will explore new partnership opportunities with Mobile Health AG to market the consilium care platform in the US as part of the Infosys Health Platform (IHP).
• Data access supporting real-time reporting: Mobile Health AG emphasizes major value in alerts where self-reported symptoms are not so serious to warrant a trip to the ER. Patients can record the seriousness of 140 symptoms on a real time basis allowing improved case management by oncologists. An example of better case management is the availability of an application which triggers an alert based on the ranking of symptoms. This ranking system also allows doctors to compare how they interpret symptom seriousness vs the patient.

Frank Gulitz highlights that the next step is to do predictive analytics on the relationship between diagnostics, treatments, and outcomes; for example, addressing needs at both the aggregate and, in the future, the individual patient level. In addition, the Mobile Health AG database can be an information source that provides tips and recommendations to patients based on their status.

The Bottom Line: Innovative patient experience is also good for the business of healthcare.

Mobile Health AG is the first of potentially many solutions that will use cloud-based reporting of patient symptoms combined with the power of AI and analytics. The ability to keep doctors apprised of patient status in real-time is a breakthrough for total health well-being and emergency cost deferral.