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According to Dr. Patricia Mechael, executive director of the mHealth Alliance, in developing countries the average doctor-to-patient ratio is one doctor to every 250,000 patients. Yet these same countries account for 80% of mobile subscriptions worldwide. It’s no surprise, then, that mobile health technology has substantial potential to improve access to healthcare in the developing world.

MedTech is transforming the world in which we live; we are healthier and more able than ever before. However, there are still a number of fundamental challenges that we face both locally and globally. The launch of the Longitude Prize 2014, with it’s £10 million prize fund, is seeking solutions to some of these fundamental scientific challenges. Antibiotics resistance, paralysis and dementia are on the shortlist of issues that could reap a £10m research windfall. The MedTech community has a vital and integral role to play, harnessing its power to innovate and accelerate towards the winning solutions!

In linguistics, describing a word as a false friend implies that despite similarity in spelling or pronunciation, it actually has distinct – sometimes even contradictory – meanings in different languages. Describing rare diseases as ‘rare’ creates a similarly false association, one which implies they have a limited impact and scarcely occur. Drawing such a parallel does not reflect the reality for the approximately 30 million European citizens who have received a rare disease diagnosis. For them, a rare disease is anything but rare. Instead, it is an often long and terrifying crossing into largely unchartered waters that are characterised by a lack of information, specialists’ know-how and effective treatment. 

I overheard a debate at a breakfast meeting at the World Economic Forum Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China that went like this:

“The market won’t accept a malaria vaccine that costs more than $.40 a dose.”

“But that’s not possible, why can’t we just start solving the technical problem and then figure out how to pay for it?”

The impressive spread of mobile connectivity in recent years has attracted attention on the infinite possibilities to transform healthcare services, making them accessible to people regardless of their age, social status or geographical location. Thousands of mobile applications have been developed and hundreds of pilot studies have been launched in an attempt to capture a slice of the pie. With increasing prevalence of cancer and rocketing healthcare costs, could mHealth be a solution for cancer supportive care?  We dig in to find out.

Imagine walking for most of the day to get to the health center nearest your community, carrying your young child who is very ill. When you arrive, the doctor takes a sample from your child to perform a diagnostic test. You then learn that it will take a month or more to receive the results, as only a specialised laboratory can perform the necessary test to obtain a diagnosis. This sort of unnecessary delay can be the difference between life and death. It is still, nevertheless, the reality in many countries, especially in limited resource settings where diagnostic testing is centralised, and most patients live far from testing sites.

Does Europe have a proper start-up culture? Are we doing enough for young professionals? According to Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, in her article for the World Economic Forum, we could do more to make Europe fertile ground for start-ups, and engage the youngest generation entering the workforce. As a young professional in Brussels well-acquainted with millennial woes, I was eminently interested in the views of an established and influential official at the European Union.

According to EDMA’s 2012 European In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) Market Statistics Report, the in vitro diagnostics market in Europe has decreased 2.2% in 2012. These results had been predicted in the previous EDMA report released for 2011, given austerity measures to cut costs in health expenditure. However, a decline in revenue for IVDs might have bad effects in the health of Europeans: there is good reason to believe that governments should invest in IVDs when trying to save money in healthcare.

Getting the timing right for the implementation of changes is essential to ensuring that the new regulations result in a better system for IVDs rather than a bureaucratic quagmire.  The sweeping changes being made to risk classification will be complex and time-consuming.  The lessons learned from similar overhauls in other markets show us that a period of transition is essential to optimise the implementation of changes for the new European IVD legal framework.