GreatCall - Seniors not ready to text?

Over at MobiHealthNews, Brian Dolan talks with the VP of strategy over at GreatCall. If you don't know them, GreatCall is the company behind the Jitterbug cell phone MVNO aimed at seniors. They are also the folks that picked up "Pill Phone" and a number of other on-device applications aimed at this market.

Two things come out of this interview that need expansion. First, according to GreatCall 80% of seniors' activity on cell phones is voice. Given that the average subscriber is 68, is this truly surprising - No. But what does this tell us, almost nothing. Four or five years ago, I'll be that close to 80% of total activity on US cell phones was voice. All that this means is that text messages aimed at seniors need to be written more carefully, and creatively.

More importantly, 38% of Jitterbug users expressed a willingness to pay for health-related services. This is probably 3x or 4x the number for the general public. Again, this makes sense. Seniors use more health care services, they are more aware of the need to manage their own healthcare, and once retired have more time to manage their own care. But this is good news, and we can only hope it spreads to the rest of the population as more mHealth services become available.

Money quote, “We’re too early to get payer reimbursement on a lot of this,” Pantalone said. “If we wait around for the government to pay for all of this, we’re going to lose this generation of seniors.”