MEMOTEXT in 2014 part of the growth of mHealth Companies
Posted on February 6, 2015 by Noah Nemoy
The past year has been one of tremendous growth and new opportunities for both MEMOTEXT – one of the pioneering mHealth companies – and mHealth as a whole. The two trends that power the mHealth revolution; increased usage of mobile technology and the move towards decentralized and personalized health care, have continued unabated. While mHealth is an industry still largely in its infancy, the use of this technology will only increase as the gap between the 10% of smartphone owners using health apps and 72% of patients using mobile apps, continues to close.
2014 saw the entry of new players into the industry. Apple partnered with Epic Systems and the Mayo Clinic to launch HealthKit, a mobile health tracking app. Governments have also been getting on board as we saw the U.S. government launch openFDA, allowing app developers access to millions of datasets of drug adverse reactions. In Canada, MaRS helped incubate Ontario mHealth start-ups and connect them with incumbent stakeholders. It’s little surprise that as the mHealth revolution continues to take hold it is forecast to have yearly double digit growth, becoming a $58.8 billion global industry by 2020.
It has also been an exciting year for MEMOTEXT, as the number of our partnerships and innovations in our portfolio continues to expand. MEMOTEXT and Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) PerformRx unveiled
HealthNHand, a new asthma adherence program. Aside from sending patients behavior-specific reminders to take their medication and educating them about their condition, HealthNHand also informs patients when air quality indicators (AQI) are moderate or poor. MEMOTEXT also developed
MyCFCoach, a program to help patients manage their Cystic Fibrosis. In the health plan space, Green Shield Canada and MEMOTEXT launched
stick2it, a new hypertension medication adherence program. The program’s results should be published later this year. Other exciting programs are with Text2Cope to offer personalized support and healthy lifestyle advice to families of obese pediatric patients. Look out for our partnership with
SmartMom Canada to launch a personalized prenatal text messaging program. Another major development is MEMOTEXT’s recent move to MaRS. By laying out this groundwork over the past year, MEMOTEXT is poised to reap the benefits throughout 2015.