In U.S. the biggest area of investment is in healthcare, both by the government and the individuals and the cost of healthcare is growing by 6-8 percent every year. In the next 10 years, the U.S. healthcare industry is projected to be a $45 trillion market. Over the last few years the major shift has been towards mobile health or what is known as mHealth — supporting medical and public health practices via mobile handheld devices, patient monitoring devices and other wireless technologies. mHealth has grown rapidly across the world in concert with the widespread availability of mobile phones. In the developing and developed regions alike, mHealth connects healthcare professionals with patients.

The U.S. healthcare market for mobile learning products and services rose to $105 million in 2009 and the over all demand is expected to grow by a healthy 24 percent to reach the revenues of $306 million by 2014. Most players in this sector now have started to offer an integrated system of medical information for mobile devices. Some are also experimenting with different business models like offering premium and free content to providing fee based/subscription services. Custom content service providers are partnering with veteran healthcare and medical content publishers to create a variety of custom mobile learning content and hosted services. There is also tremendous advancement in mHealth due to the growth in mobile technology such as location awareness, faster processing speeds thanks to 3G, high quality digital imaging. All this is contributing highly to the growth of mobile learning.

For entrepreneurs, healthcare market is a great area to make a strike, especially with the advent of tablets and smart phones and the ever growing app market. In the same way, starups playing in BI and data warehousing can also reap the most in health care market. With medical data distributed across different centers, vendors and devices, there is an increased chance of data leakage through fraud, abuse or duplication. BI vendors can help considerably in reducing these and bring the cost of health care down by a large margin in the long term.

As far as challenges are concerned, entrepreneurs today have the same set of fundamental challenges they faced a decade or two back i.e. develop an idea that matters, and ensure a thorough execution. For a startup, a great idea is defined by one that addresses a large market with clearcut differentiation and where the product or service is built in a capital efficient manner. As for execution, it really comes down to attracting the best people.

The Author is the CEO of SCIOinspire