Open platforms and open community are highlighted in a recent guest post in Forbes online magazine. Entitled mHealth: The Next Frontier For Mobile Service Growth, the article discusses the powerful opportunity for mobile healthcare, including the potential fiscal value of the mHealth market, estimated to be worth $4.6 billion by 2014. However, It’s not the monetary value here that’s so important. What stands out is the article’s emphasis on the need for open platforms and multiple players co-innovating in order to unlock the full potential of mHealth.
This idea hearkens back to a paper published in Science Magazine in 2010, in which Open mHealth founders Deborah Estrin and Ida Sim made the case for an open software architecture to liberate and catalyze innovation in mobile health.
Open mHealth today is realizing this architecture. What’s needed now is for “collaboration across traditional boundaries” to enrich this common architecture and enable innovation to flourish. This ecosystem of players from tech, health, business and beyond is at the heart of our work, and central to the future of mobile health. Click here to read the full article on Forbes.com.