In just the last three years alone, the industry has witnessed significant strides that mobile operators have made in expanding from direct-to-consumer health services to the enterprise health market. Orange, together with GE, has been awarded a contract to integrate the imaging needs of the most populous region in France, connecting over 90 hospitals and over 500 radiologists, covering over 12 million patients. AT&T has been awarded important contracts for the Indiana health information exchange as well as for Baylor Healthcare network, a large private healthcare network.

Traditionally, the mobile operator value chain consists of those core capabilities that enable it to acquire customers through its sales and distribution network, set them up on the network, identify and connect consumers on a network, create value added services in both voice and data, provide customer service and run sophisticated billing and tariff programs to optimise revenue per customer. These capabilities are the basis of the first mHealth services of health messaging or health hotlines. They are natural extensions of the value-added service model, developed by partnering with content providers or health service providers riding off the operator core network and customer billing capabilities.

In time, many mobile operators have also expanded from their core business of consumer-driven network services to provision of cross-industry enterprise ICT solutions, based on their core capabilities of connectivity, networking and large scale information management. These mobile operators are able to create a cost and capability advantage by investing in assets and capabilities which can scale across multiple industry offerings ranging from small/medium enterprises, to government, aerospace, and financial services, and health. These allow the mobile operator to offer standard outsourced ICT services to hospitals, just as they would to other large enterprise players.

In recent years, some mobile operators (particularly those with strong group operations) have developed specialised global business integration capabilities, ranging from cloud computing, portal technologies, payment mechanisms, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) platforms and solutions, and systems integration. These are the capabilities that allow the mobile operator to create solutions connecting the healthcare providers with the patient, as well as with other healthcare players in the industry.

This 3-step evolution has allowed the mobile industry to increasingly provide a value proposition to the breadth of the health industry, while providing better utilisation of its core assets (see right).