Talking Technology with Talking Tiles….

*****despite Bill’s picture appearing above, this is still me – Gareth :) *****

Hi all.

One of the best bits of my job is getting to meet partners and customers that are doing really interesting things in health across the world. One of the partners I bumped into recently has an amazing solution for a really important set of customers – kids and adults affected by a speech or language disorder. The solution really helps them communicate with the world around them - I loved seeing this in action – and I think you might be interested in it too. I will hand over to Sammy Wahab, CEO of Mozzaz for the details in his guest post below:

Consumer-Driven Healthcare

There is a significant trend in modern day healthcare that is increasingly focusing on driving improvement in health outcomes. We are moving to a world in which more and more emphasis will be on gathering evidence to identify the interventions that are the most cost effective at improving health outcomes. At the center of all this is the patient. The patient is becoming the new “superconsumer” in health care as we shift to a more outcomes-focused future. With access to immediate content, data, information, and knowledge, consumers can share all of this information with their care providers by using mobile technologies and apps. This new method of exchanging information is changing the way in which health professionals treat and interact with either patients.

At Mozzaz, our whole value proposition is centered on this new “health consumer” - we are delivering consumer-driven collaborative care. From our own personal story and experience dealing with a complex chronic condition such as autism, there’s typically a team of professionals that are there to help with various therapy treatments and care. The challenge however, has been the coordination and collaboration across this team that becomes very difficult - which impacts on the quality of care being delivered to the patient and the inability to measure outcomes effectively.

From what started as a dinnertime table topic to find a better way to deliver an app for assistive and augmentative communication (AAC) for the speech impaired, quickly turned into a Windows Azure cloud-based cross-mobile technology app and platform service that today is now TalkingTILES ! TalkingTILES is a communication and learning app that supports remote collaboration and remote programming by utilizing Windows Azure services making it a truly mobile and flexible solution.

As a Microsoft BizSpark partner, we were able to quickly start developing our solution immediately with the developer tools and platform available through the program. This along with the support we continuously receive from the partner teams including the healthcare team is tremendously valuable.

We’ve had such a great response so far to TalkingTILES from both the professionals who work with disabled clients and the actual people who need the app to communicate. In light of our goal to connect the consumer to the care provider, our next phase will be bridging the usage data and analytics captured at the patient-consumer device to their care provider’s case management system for a complete integrated round-trip solution to further deliver timely and accountable outcomes.

Thanks Sammy and the team at Mozzaz – it’s great to see innovation like this being used to make a real difference, and it is even better that they now have a Windows 8 version of their application – which you can download here.

Gareth

Windows 8 lead – Worldwide Health at Microsoft