Motorola Mobility Acquisition Could Revive Google Health

Google (Menlo Park, CA, USA) has announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility (Libertyville, IL, USA) for US$12.5 billion just two months since shutting down the failed Google Health personal health records platform.

That decision may be reversed, based on several components of the acquisition. First, the acquisition provides Google with a built-in healthcare client base, as some medical professionals already use Motorola's MC55A0-HC and MC75A0-HC handheld devices, designed specifically for doctors, nurses, and other clinicians. Secondly, Motorola is one of the three leading Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors in healthcare, a market projected to increase to a $1.3 billion market by 2016. And in 2010, Motorola Mobility bought 4Home, which distributes connected home services; these include energy management, home security monitoring, and home health monitors, among others.

The growth of home monitoring services of the elderly and chronically ill as an alternative to hospitalization, nursing homes, and long-term care is perceived as exponential, and another component of Motorola Mobility includes the company’s set-top cable TV boxes. These could potentially serve as a future control hub for home health monitoring. Google will then have a multifaceted platform for remote patient monitoring, a complementary business to a patient-controlled data storage product like Google Health. By purchasing Motorola Mobility, Google now is poised to make a major change in this important sector.

The acquisition is also another example of the vertical integration between mobile hardware and software, an alignment that could force healthcare providers to use certain mobile software based on their device preferences, or vice versa. This alignment will likely extend to the application level as well, and healthcare providers will need to be well informed as to application compatibility when making their mobile platform decisions. Of particular concern will be how this hardware/software alignment will impact other significant technology investments, especially the electronic medical record (EMR), another possible hint to future plans for Google Health.

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