Prescription Payments on Mobile Worth £1.14bn in the UK

The potential mobile market for healthcare prescripton payments in the UK amounts to £1.14bn, according to Mobile Healthcare Trends data released by mobileSQUARED. Almost 40m Brits, meanwhile, would welcome mHealth serv­ices in some capacity.

The study found that over 8.7m Brits would be interested in paying for their prescriptions using a mobile device – multiplied by the average annual prescription spend, of £131.72 per person, that produces the impressive sum of £1.14bn in revenues. But that still only represents 13 per cent of the total annual prescription spend, of £9bn.

“The data shows that UK consumers want to use their mobile device as part of their healthcare, whether to communicate with their local surgery, make an appointment or pay for a prescription,” says Nick Lane, chief strategy analyst at mobileSQUARED. “Using mobile to communicate with patients will have a massive impact on savings for the NHS, and so the role mobile will play in healthcare has to be taken seriously today.”

The healthcare database, which is built on mobileSQUARED’s Mobile Consumer Trends, tracks and forecasts consumer usage habits on mobile, providing granular, searchable data – including, for example, that the number of male iPhone users that would make appointments on their device in Q1, 2012 is 2.34m.