Qualcomm Life answers
your wireless health questions
Deciding to enable a medical device with wireless technology is the easy part. Knowing how to do it is a completely different story. Rest assured – Qualcomm Life is here to help. See below for some of the most frequently asked questions about how Qualcomm Life can help you achieve your wireless health vision.
Have a question that isn’t addressed below? Simply fill out the information request form and a member of our service team will get back to you shortly.
- What is the 2net Ecosystem?
- What services does the Qualcomm Life team provide?
- How will an engagement with Qualcomm Life impact my development costs and launch timelines?
- What makes solutions built on the 2net Platform unique from what has been available to-date?
- What are the benefits of 2net for my end-users, including customers, physicians and payors?
- How does 2net work?
- How do devices connect with the 2net Platform?
- How are the data from medical devices stored and secured on the 2net Platform?
- Can a healthcare services or disease management company leverage the 2net Platform?
- How will Qualcomm Life and the 2net Platform enable devices and services to work together more effectively?
- What is Qualcomm Life’s business model?
What is the 2net Ecosystem?
The 2net Ecosystem is comprised of wireless medical device solutions integrated on the 2net Platform, an analytics layer for aggregating medical device data, and the interfaces created for interoperability to deliver biometric data to end users such as patients, physicians and caregivers.
The 2net Ecosystem includes three key sets of companies:
- Companies building medical devices that have wireless cellular technology embedded or medical devices that need to be wirelessly enabled through a connection with an external device (i.e. the 2net Hub), and application development companies that want to leverage smartphones to distribute data
- Healthcare services companies, such as disease management companies that kit together multiple medical devices to help patients and their caregivers better manage care
- Healthcare payers, pharmaceutical or analytics companies that want to leverage biometric data and analytics to enrich their more static, claims-based or manually entered data.
What services does the Qualcomm Life team provide?
Qualcomm Life provides end-to-end managed services to wirelessly connect your medical devices or integrate your mobile applications reliably and at scale.
There are four gateways onto our 2net Platform’s data center that each come with different services and solutions:
- Cellular embedded devices - We can help you design and develop your cellular-embedded medical device and provide a managed network service leveraging our network infrastructure.
- The 2net Hub –An award winning compact plug-and-play connectivity gateway comprised of three short-range radios that collect data from medical devices and send the data wirelessly to the 2net Platform’s cloud-based data center. The 2net Hub supports SSL communication of data and is FDA listed as a Class I Medical Device Data System (MDDS). As an MDDS device, it is designed, developed and manufactured in accordance with a quality system compliant with ISO13485 standards, meaning it aligns with the quality requirements of U.S. and international regulatory agencies in the health care industry. We perform the integration with your medical device and manage the data communication and delivery as a managed service into your application.
- Smartphones – We can help you build great applications that help aggregate and leverage biometric medical data through cell phones and work with our wireless carrier partners to deploy at scale.
- Service platform integration – Whether a personal health record, electronic medical record, or application that received data through some mechanism other than our platform, including manual entry, we can integrate your data into the 2net Platform through backend service platform integration.
Whether your device has cellular embedded or you connect through the 2net Hub, we provide a managed, end-to-end network service for customer devices that includes: device integration; Hub design and certification; cellular data costs; connectivity; secure encryption and integration to wireless carriers; proactive network monitoring; tier 2 and 3 live and around-the-clock customer support; data storage that’s designed to meet HIPAA security requirements; and integration to customer applications and services.
Since medical device data is coming through our 2net Platform, we are also in a unique position to explore how to store data to facilitate new opportunities in healthcare analytics, informatics and services for our ecosystem customers and technology partners within the bounds of applicable device regulations and privacy laws.
How will an engagement with Qualcomm Life impact my development costs and launch timelines?
Qualcomm Life makes wireless health simple for our customers and technology partners. We removed the burden of working with multiple mobile carriers and the complexities of transfer algorithms and storage capabilities from the wireless health equation. The 2net Platform makes it easy for our customers and technology partners to untether data from their medical devices in a process that is as easy for them as it is for a patient.
Typical timelines for a device manufacturer to develop a wireless solution on their own is two years or more, and often the program is later cancelled when the technology becomes obsolete, the program goes over budget, or the solution proves unsupportable or unscalable, particularly internationally.
Qualcomm Life is a company that was founded, in part, to assist medical device manufacturers who approached Qualcomm for help when their own wireless connectivity and interoperability attempts became untenable. Medical device manufacturers have learned the hard way how many moving parts and hidden costs are involved with a broad wireless implementation.
We build our solutions with interoperability and scalability in mind. We created the 2net Hub as an affordable and expeditious solution to wirelessly connect medical devices to the 2net Platform. And because the 2net Hub is an FDA-listed medical device, our customers and technology partners are getting a wireless health solution that is scalable, reliable, interoperable and extensible at much lower cost and exponentially faster than if they did it on their own.
What makes solutions built on the 2net Platform unique from what has been available to-date?
The 2net Platform is a unique technology-agnostic data system designed to enable end-to-end interoperability for medical devices, making information easily accessible for device companies and ultimately device users and their healthcare providers and caregivers.
Our customers and technology partners are seeking comprehensive solutions, so they don’t have to piece together network operators.
With Qualcomm Incorporated being a premier enterprise data mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Qualcomm Life is leveraging an extremely scalable, interoperable and reliable service designed to provide a high degree of security. It’s our job to reliably transmit data from our customers’ medical devices to the intended service or application and we manage that responsibility proactively.
What are the benefits of 2net for my end-users, including customers, physicians and payers?
The 2net Platform makes information easily accessible by device users and their healthcare providers and caregivers, regardless of their level of technology expertise. The 2net Hub, in particular, can provide an immediate plug-and-play two-way connection to end users’ devices.
Now devices in the hands of vast numbers of consumers and healthcare practitioners can operate with the reliability and security of enterprise-managed devices.
Customers and technology partners can mix their choice of devices with applications from multiple sources, and it all just works.
How does 2net work?
The 2net Platform facilitates an encryption process that leverages network operations and data centers, allowing medical devices to share data with healthcare providers, payers and patients through a data platform designed to meet HIPAA privacy and security guidelines.
- Data Acquisition: Data is obtained from a patient’s medical device through several potential gateways, such as the FDA-listed 2net Hub, a mobile phone, a cellular-enabled device or an integrated service platform. Qualcomm Life has pathways for each gateway to extract data from the device and input it into the 2net Platform’s data center.
- Data Transmission: Once the data is acquired from the medical device, it is transferred via cellular technology utilizing redundant, private connections between the wireless carriers and the 2net Platform’s data center.
- Data Storage/Access: After the 2net Platform has received the transmission, medical device data is transferred to the manufacturers’ interface of choice on behalf of the patient, physicians, payers, or other partners to access. The tools in our network operations center proactively monitor and manage the network to provide reliable data transfer.
The 2net Platform has been designed to meet HIPAA privacy and security requirements, leveraging network operations, data centers and cloud-based services that allow integrated medical devices to reliably share data with approved healthcare providers, payers, patients and caregivers.
How do devices connect with the 2net Platform?
The 2net Platform supports four gateways:
- A standalone FDA-listed external device -- the 2net Hub
- Medical devices with an embedded cellular component
- Medical data sent from mobile phones
- Service platform integration between the medical grade 2net Platform to customer or technology partner service platforms using application programming interfaces (APIs)
The award winning 2net Hub, one of the four gateways used to access the 2net Platform’s data center, delivers a new dimension of short-range radio flexibility, security, interoperability and seamless data transfer, while serving as the information highway for machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity for medical devices into and out of the home. The 2net Hub is an FDA-listed, compact “plug-and-play” gateway that supports Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, WiFi, and ANT+ local area radio protocols. The 2net Hub is Continua-certified, and supports 3G and 2G cellular communications. The 2net Hub supports SSL communication of data and is FDA listed as a Class I Medical Device Data System (MDDS). As an MDDS device, it is designed, developed and manufactured in accordance with a quality system compliant with ISO13485 standards, meaning it aligns with the quality requirements of U.S. and international regulatory agencies in the healthcare industry.
How are the data from medical devices stored and secured on the 2net Platform?
The cloud-based 2net Platform stores and transfers data once it has been acquired from the medical device so it can be provided to designated partner health care service companies, providers, payers, pharmaceutical companies, application and device partners, all on a system designed for security and interoperability. The medical device data are stored in our secure Payment Card Industry or PCI-compliant data center designed to meet or exceed HIPAA privacy requirements. The data is encrypted in motion and at rest, transmitted to the manufacturers’ interface of choice for the end-user, and we have redundancy throughout the system.
Can a healthcare services or disease management company leverage the 2net Platform?
Yes, in fact the 2net Hub solution offers a great example. A diabetes management company could send a patient home with various medical devices from customers and technology partners, such as a glucometer, weight scale, blood pressure monitor, pulse oximeter, and activity monitor that are all connected to the 2net Hub.
Because the 2net Ecosystem is growing, the range of devices a given 2net Hub can connect with grows over time. Therefore, the disease management or services company has access to easily integrated solutions that are user-friendly and have the ability to integrate with a wide range of devices, facilitated by the 2net Platform.
How will Qualcomm Life and the 2net Platform enable devices and services to work together more effectively?
Because the 2net Platform is integrated both with the devices and with the service companies, neither has to worry about integrating with each other. As medical devices get on the platform, they are made available to and easily used by service companies on the other end.
Because companies need to focus on return on investment with their wireless solutions, they can’t afford to integrate every single time a new service offering or company goes online. The 2net Platform offers companies scalable interoperability that can ultimately help them to reduce costs, and when these benefits are passed down to the end-user, it lowers costs all around.
What is Qualcomm Life’s business model?
There are three key components to our business today:
First is the award winning 2net Platform that facilitates solutions created with our customers and technology partners to connect their devices to the network, getting valuable biometric data flowing reliably and through a system designed for security to their end-users.
We allow our customers and technology partners leveraging the 2net Hub to purchase the hub directly from Qualcomm Life’s contract manufacturer. So while Qualcomm Life does not sell the hub, we provide the managed network services to manage the hubs, the devices they connect to and the data delivery into the application.
The second component of our business is in development and is biometric data aggregation and enabling analytics. The 2net Platform services will allow data to be de-identified and aggregated, within the bounds of applicable device regulations and data protection laws and regulations, for use by device makers, healthcare service companies, application developers, and pharmaceutical companies.
The third component of our business is application support. We can help customers and technology partners work through mobile phone connectivity challenges, and help them build great applications that can connect to medical devices. We work with our wireless operator technology partners to maximize reach for medical data
