PATEGOU JOSEPH, International Strategy And Influence

mHealth market: the future challenges

The configuration of the mobile health industry, offer to pharmaceutical companies many

opportunities and challenges.

We can identify three main challenges:

1. The first one is to win the trust of patients

Pharma companies are fighting an uphill battle in many ways. One is that, as

technologies like mobile devices bring healthcare into patients’ homes, patient trust

becomes more important than ever. And pharmaceutical companies generally aren’t as

trusted as physicians or even insurers.

A Deloitte survey last year found that although people trust doctors and academic

centers most, the next most trusted entities are companies like WebMD, then Google search

results. At the bottom of the list are pharma and payor companies.

A more recent study, by Makovsky Health, found that only around 35 percent of

consumers would trust a disease website sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, and 16

percent said they would never visit a disease website sponsored by a pharma company.

2. The second one is the ability to take risk

Pharma companies is historically extremely risk-averse, when you introduce a new

factor, it inherently increases risk. In a business that is focused on reducing risk, then those

are things that life sciences companies are going to stay away from. In the business of

mobile health will always need to take risk to be the best.

3. The last challenge will be its ability to produce relevant apps for patients, for that,

they need to develop a customer culture.

Figure 1: Main challenges