Ever since I attended the mHealth Summit last year, I’ve been mulling over something I heard a speaker say about medical research methods. Certainly this is the cliff notes version, but they essentially said, “We need better research methods that work faster so that we can deliver results before the technology changes again and the results are invalid.”
I think this is a powerful concept and something I haven’t seen any companies really tackle. The medical establishment has its research methods and it’s going to be hard to get them to have them adapt for things like mHealth technology. Although, I do like some of the things that are happening with collaborative and open source style of research methods.
With that said, I was intrigued by a message I got from a Dr. Chandrashan Perera about a new medical journal focused on mobile healht. The internationally peer reviewed open-access medical journal is called: The Journal of Mobile Technology in Medicine. They publish both original research articles, and perspective pieces. Issues are published on a quarterly basis, and are available freely online. To keep the journal bias free, they do not have any advertising, and they do not make a profit.
They have recently published Volume 2, Issue 2, so you can take a look at their initial work. I hope that they’ll continue to evolve their publishing methods and review methods as the mHealth landscape evolves. It’s certainly a challenge, but one that we need to accomplish.
