Tom Wells in the Sun reports that an urgent review has been ordered after a confidential child protection report drawn up by staff at the council involved in the Baby P scandal was found after being mislaid by a member of staff on a railway carriage. The 15-page Haringey Council file, which included details about a boy taken away from his mother over fears he could be abused.

Isn’t it about time that we made it illegal to carry unencrypted confidential information in public? Seems like the only sure fire way of stopping these “isolated cases”.

Haringey Council should urgently seek the advice of Mobile Service providers eg. the Public Sector Team at BlackBerry who presented the results of their work with Direct Care Services at Glasgow City Council at the recent Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit.

Mobile Application Testing Times, the blog of Faraz Syed CEO at DeviceAnywhere, includes mHealth in predictions for 2010 for how “everyday people” will benefit from all the launches, innovations and technological advancements in the Smartphone industry.

“mHealth Helps Consumers Take Their Health into their Own Hands—While the monolithic debate continues in Congress over the national healthcare plan, healthcare organizations and independent developers such as EOS Health and Sensei are launching all flavors of innovative mobile apps that enable consumers to proactively manage their own physical fitness, whether it’s alerting them to take their insulin or helping them make healthy eating choices at point of purchase. In the same way that mBanking has helped us manage our financial health, the new crop of mHealth apps are helping us manage the most important health of all…our own physical wellbeing.”

Wayan Vota, Senior Director ICIP Program at Inveneo, asked me this question in response to a post I made reporting on Jaspal Sandhu’s review of the Global Health Research Forum.

I could write a book on it, but thankfully others have already eg. “Innovations: Mobilizing Markets” (A MIT Press Journal) which has a foreword written by “Mo Ibrahim” – one of my favorite social entrepreneurs.

In brief: Entrepreneurship is aided by mobiles because they have an inbuilt payment mechanism. There are also options that expand upon this eg. Mobile Suica, m-pesa, O2 Visa/Oyster, Google Checkout, Paypal, SimPay etc etc. Some helpful videos produced by my friend Jonathan Marks feature entrepreneurs Simon Cavill of Mi-Pay.com and Suresh Anantpurkar of mChek.com explaining the enormous “social” impact that these mobile payment technologies are having.

To my mind once you have a fair and easy means of payment you are assured of the drive of entrepreneurs and in mHealth this brings about the potential for a truly free market for Healthcare IT. Today the vast majority of Healthcare IT systems are designed and built to meet the needs of governments, insurers or existing providers. Free market conditions present an opportunity to better serve patient needs and this is transformational because most people in healthcare are more than aware that even very basic innovations aren’t being adopted as a result of the vested interests of existing industry participants. Remove the status quo and circumvent those individuals, groups and companies who are resisting innovation and change can quickly happen.

If this potential is still hard to appreciate I suggest reading some background on the business impact of mobile communities in more advanced mobile markets such as Finland, Korea, Japan etc. My recommendations for good books would include Digital Korea by Tomi Ahonen and Jim O’Reilly, Communities Dominate Brands by T Ahonen and Alan Moore and Making Money from 3G Services again by T Ahonen.

Also check out the work of the mHealth Alliance (eg. their Active Women & Population Program) and PEPFAR’s “Phones for Health public-private partnership”.

Irish Mobilists are invited to learn about Nokia Ovi Store opportunities at a Developer Open Day sponsored by Forum Nokia and Nokia Ireland taking place in Dublin on the 13 January 2010.

An opportunity to meet informally with the Nokia developer community in Ireland as well Forum Nokia and Nokia Ireland teams this will be a chance to learn about Ovi Store opportunities; Open Screen Project (a $10 million grant program for developers); Forum Nokia tools, developer programs, support and other offerings.

Venue is the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8

Register today as spaces are limited…

Don Reisinger at CNET reports on how Andrea Boland, a Democrat Legislator from Maine, is calling for Mobiles to carry Health warnings based on some as yet unscientifically proven Health Claims that they can cause “Brain Cancer”.

It gave me the idea for a range of warnings of the “Scientifically proven” Health Benefits of mobile phones….

“This device can be used to encourage you to avoid/stop smoking via a number of different scientifically proven ways eg. as part of a SMS Quit application, by competing for the same pocket money spend, by acting as a status symbol, by occupying your idle fingers…. etc etc”

“This device will be helpful in the event of an emergency as it offers anywhere anytime access to emergency call operators….”

“This device offers caller ID which can help minimise the impact of bogus callers to emergency service providers”

“Used properly this device can improve road safety by helping you reschedule appointments and avoid the need to rush due to unexpected traffic conditions”

“This device may save your life if you get lost“

“This device may help you deliver a baby“

“As part of a treatment program this device can help you manage your blood sugar levels, Asthma, Blood Pressure, COPD etc”

“This device can enable you to play brain games which can help your concentration levels”

“This device can improve your literacy (Millions of books are already read every year on mobiles)”

“This device can help you contact health helplines to discuss medical problems“

“This device can facilitate timely and efficient collection of donations to Health Charities eg. in 2009 £7.2 million was paid to the Children in Need charity via premium SMS“

“The Cameraphone on this device can help Doctors to diagnose uncommon problems“

“This 3G Video Mobile can securely connect you with an informed registered Doctor“

Use the comments to let me know if you have any suggestions…

Jaspal Sandhu has posted over on the Global Health Ideas blog a very detailed round up of the “Global Forum for Health Research Forum 2009: Innovating for the Health of All” which took place in Havana, Cuba in November.

In this 5th of a series of posts Jaspal concludes that “While there was discussion of both eHealth and mHealth, the discussion focused primarily on the latter”.

Jaspal summarised with a very important point about the “Need to think more creatively” and “be bolder with approaches” because “if we are, poor countries “could leapfrog” in health and development terms” (according to Garance Upham, Chief Editor, Safe Observer International). Dr Jane Kengeya, WHO, also made a very important point that whilst “Many of the applications discussed focused on SMS and telephony capabilities; we should think about leveraging more advanced capabilities of mobile phones”

Jaspal also observed that the link between Social Entrepreneurship and mHealth was a key issue missing from the explored topics. I had an interesting comment thread discussion just the other day with Wayan Vota and Eric Blantz from Inveneo and this was something I really wanted to share with them. To my mind the importance of this link will be the key to 99 of the 100 reasons that mHealth will succeed in both developed and emerging markets.

The latest issue profiles AVIVO Mobile Patient Monitoring System from Corventis Inc, BRIT Vision Mammography Image review tools, FitBit Inc’s Physical Activity Monitor and Pocket Heart a “cardiac educator” application from eMedia Interactive Ltd.

MobiHealthNews has published a 2009 State of the Industry Report and made it available completely free of charge.

The report includes “Industry Metrics”, discussion of network operator roles, summary of Care Provider Pilots, summary of the various mHealth Alliances and Institutes, Reimbursement issues and 2009 Wireless Healthcare Deals and Venture Capital.

Click here to download it now

TMC DataMonitor Via COMTEX

“The 2009 healthcare technology buzzword was ‘mHealth,’ or mobile health. Datamonitor has seen a moderate but steadily increasing interest in this concept over the year as the phrase began appearing with increasing frequency in the media and at conferences. Unlike the pattern seen with the last healthcare IT buzzword, ‘radio frequency identification’ (RFID), a type of mobile health technology that became a ‘craze’ and then experienced a subsequent ‘fizzle,’ Datamonitor does not expect the mobile health trend to stop. But as with all buzzwords, some of the excitement is hype, while other aspects ring true.“

Click here to join in the mHealth discussions and debate over at the Linkedin mHealth networking group

Sarah Forsey at Mobile News reports an interview with Daniel Morrison-Gardiner, RIM Senior Public Sector Sales Manager, from the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit.

Check out the interview and then get some more info from my review as this was one of the most compelling explanation I’ve ever heard of the wide opportunities for the use of mobile phones in modern Healthcare systems. No doubt this approach to understanding and serving customer needs underpins why RIM is bucking the market trend and reporting 3Q Profits up 59%.

Read my review of the Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit here.