Partnership Creating Diagnostics Available Directly From Mobile Devices
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
miDIAGNOSTICS and emocha Mobile Health join forces to create diagnostics for the future.
Johns Hopkins startup company emocha Mobile Health has developed a platform of digital mobile applications that streamline the continuum of care and, together with miDIAGNOSTICS, will enable mobile health solutions to perform diagnostic tests integrated in silicon chips. In other words, this series of tests will now be available directly from mobile devices.
Point-of-care testing allows patient diagnoses wherever the patient is. The results of care are thus timely and allow rapid treatment to the patient. Empowering clinicians to make decisions at the point-of-care has great potential to improve healthcare delivery and to balance healthcare disparities. The success of a potential shift from curative medicine to predictive, personalized, and preemptive medicine could be reliant on the development of miniaturized devices for point-of-care testing.
The miDIAGNOSTICS silicon chips “act as miniaturized labs, able to detect cells, proteins, nucleic acids, or small molecules from a tiny volume of body fluid.” Available in minutes, the results can be shared via laptops, tablets, or smartphones, turning them into a mobile health solution for diagnostics at the point-of-need, anywhere, anytime.
CEO of miDIAGNOSTICS, Hilja Ibert, explained, “emocha adds mobile data management to our diagnostic devices. They will complement our products with a mobile application, cloud infrastructure, and dashboards. The mobile application will give users easy access to a diagnostic device to initiate tests and view results on their mobile devices. The cloud infrastructure is the central hub transforming future miDIAGNOSTICS’ products into impactful mobile health solutions that link patients’ results to providers and health system electronic records. Finally, the dashboard will offer a customizable view of test results, allowing consolidation of tests and data analysis.”
And since patients are increasingly willing to utilize new health tracking and monitoring technology, this could prove to be a valuable resource to connect patients with healthcare efficiently and affordably.
The collaboration could have wide-ranging applications. Emocha co-founder and CEO Sebastian Seiguer said, “We hope to be able to add miDIAGNOSTICS point-of-need testing to our mobile health interventions for a variety of use cases, like Hepatitis C medication adherence. Care has shifted rapidly to the outpatient setting, and our integrated solutions will enable providers to strongly support patients wherever they may be.”
Earlier this summer, Spartan Bioscience announced it was preparing to launch its Spartan Cube, which is a coffee cup-sized portable commercial molecular diagnostics device. The company’s claims it would enable users to quickly perform DNA testing would be a serious disruption of the point-of-care molecular diagnostic test market, which is projected to more than triple to $3.9 billion by 2024 according to Grand View Research.
Among the strong drivers for increased point-of-care capabilities are advancements in technology, the Affordable Care Act, and business models that have worked outside of healthcare.