Mobile devices are playing a hugely significant role in the digital transformation of the healthcare sector. They are being used to revolutionize many aspects of healthcare – from patient communications to professional training. This guide investigates some of the ways in which mobile health, or mHealth, technology is overhauling healthcare around the world in 2019.
The Rise of mHealth in the 21st Century
Over the past few years, the mHealth sector has grown at a frenetic pace. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of health apps available for download almost doubled. Market experts expect this growth to continue and have projected that the sector will hit a global value of $60 billion by the year 2020.
What is Driving the Growth of the Global mHealth Market?
Many speculate that the phenomenal rise of mHealth is down to the proliferation of internet access through smartphones. At last count, 67% of the world’s population use a smartphone. Smartphones, internet access and healthcare apps allow people to take greater control of their health. This is especially the case in remote or poor locations with inadequate access to healthcare and medical facilities.
Learn More
If you are interested in the subject of mobile devices in healthcare, then you should browse through the below infographic from Home Healthcare Adaptations. This informative guide covers a wide range of subjects, including:
Interesting statistics relating to the rise of mobile health technology
Examples of how mobile devices can be used in healthcare provision
A list of some of the most popular medical apps
A brief explainer of the benefits and challenges associated with this technology
Scroll down to the infographic below to learn more.
Imagine for a second: you’re walking through the busy halls of your local hospital, only to notice that the doctors and nurses around you are constantly checking their phones and tablets. It strikes you as odd, and you can’t help but think: Isn’t anyone getting any work done around here?
Actually, they are.
With over 70 percent of examined patients using at least one health app to manage their diagnosed condition, and more than 318,000 mobile healthcare apps available in top app stores worldwide, the picture of doctors and nurses relying on their devices as literal “mobile assistants” is becoming a highly sought-after reality.
While this perspective is often bolstered by positive reviews of hand-held computer use by healthcare professionals – where digital assistant devices improved physician effectiveness during patient documentation, patient care, information seeking and professional work patterns — the mHealth industry still has a lot of room to grow in terms of digital health infrastructure.
Not to be put off, mHealth developers have nevertheless continued to advance their compliance, security, accessibility, and efficiency practices in the face of wide-scale transformative change. And when asked, most mHealth developers (myself included) will tell you that what motivates us to keep going has to do with the massive potential these technologies have to literally transform the field of medicine as we know it.
And what exactly is thatpotential? Every day our news feeds are inundated with articles promoting the latest in mHealth technology – from mobile apps that can perform an ultrasound, to apps that help patients track their own symptoms – so it can be hard to navigate the ever-widening world of mobile healthcare.
In light of such a big subject then, I’ve often taken to cementing my own understanding of mobile health by thinking about the ways in which these applications are already affecting physicians, clinicians, and other practitioners at every stage of their medical career.
Put differently, from the time that an aspiring healthcare professional begins their educational journey, to their first-accepted payment for needed treatment, mobile health apps are helping doctors transform the field of medicine before our very eyes. Here’s how:
Medical Education
In a lot of our popular media, physician education is represented as an arduous journey from beginning to end. With long nights studying, cadavers to examine, and an infinite amount of medical information to digest, med students are flocking to (mobile) medical education applications that can help them test their own knowledge in a way that suits their learning style.
Health Wizz is an electronic file cabinet for your health records on your smartphone. We help provide the tools to help people aggregate their medical records, organize them, and format them so that they can be shared easily, seamlessly and securely on a blockchain, such as Ethereum.
Elevator pitch
It’s our body, it’s our data. Health Wizz is a secure mobile platform that provides consumers with the necessary tools for aggregating, organizing and sharing their medical health records with other family members or caregivers, as necessary, over the blockchain.
Founders’ story
Raj Sharma
The idea to take on the big health industry interoperability problem came to Raj Sharma, Health Wizz CEO, when he was sitting in the emergency room, helplessly watching his mother undergo yet another series of unnecessary, duplicative medical tests. This was even more painful as she had already done all those tests just a day before, at the first Emergency Room, where she was admitted after a fall. Because of interoperability issues that plague the healthcare industry, the tests could not be obtained in time for her second ER visit. As Raj sat watching his mother, exhausted and annoyed with all of the time and money wasted, he thought that if he had the healthcare data in a secure, portable format, it would have saved time and money, while ensuring better, timelier care. With this idea, he and his two co-founders Sirish Bajpai (CTO) and Dr. Nitin Desai (chief medical officer), founded Health Wizz.
With the increasingly “on the go” nature of technology and communication, information is accessible from the palm of a user’s hand in the form of mobile devices. Subsequently, the success of modern EHR software lies in the moment accessibility on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
The addition of mobile functionality for EHR systems is driving the adoption of electronic health record systems and software in the industry and contributing to meaningful use for patients and physicians alike. Patients benefit from doctors and staff who can make informed decisions by easily accessing their medical records from an easy-to-use mobile interface. Mobile EHRs allow practice staff and physicians to access valuable and crucial patient records, while increasing communication between healthcare facilities in a more efficient, secure manner.
This is incredibly useful in critical care or emergency situations; allowing physicians and other care staff to quickly, securely and accurately view patient information on the fly is a major advantage when emergency surgery or care has to be administered. With the continued scourge of the opioid epidemic requiring investments in patient and physician safety and with continued staffing shortages in the industry leading to further implementation of AI and technology based solutions, mobile EHR will be a critical tool in a healthcare staff’s arsenal, allowing the relaying and accessing of accurate information in a constantly evolving environment.
In addition, the internet, office tools and desktop computers are no longer necessary for effective documentation; mobile EHR allows offline record populating whenever and wherever it’s necessary, increasing the accuracy and timeliness of documentation. By allowing physicians and staff to accurately and conveniently exchange documentation and patient records through a secure, mobile platform, informed decisions can be made 24/7. This drives meaningful use by improving quality, safety, efficiency and care coordination for public health.
By utilizing EHR on mobile platforms, staff and physicians can increase their efficacy and accuracy when updating documentation or accessing patient files. By creating a friendly, innovative platform to access crucial information, EHR software that features mobile functionality is a necessity in modern EHR applications. It will continue to drive meaningful use and accessibility in the healthcare industry going forward as evidenced by the infographic featured below.
In the past few years, information technology has developed and now it becomes an integral part of the medical sphere. Currently, the innovation of wireless medicine is increasing rapidly and influencing the present healthcare industry.
In the year 2017, more than 3.5 billion individuals having tablets and mobile phones with access to healthcare applications, because apps are providing the various health-related solution to the patients instantly.
Future mHealth entrepreneurs or startups should consider the concept of multi-platform application development from their initial days if they want to achieve success in this medical sphere. Presently, more than 70 percent of mHealth app publishers pick both the Android platforms and iOS to deliver their app to medical care providers and patients.
The healthcare mobile app development highlights significant possibilities to both entrepreneurs and startups. A financial specialist is willing to support the growing medical industry and they are ready to invest in this era. Also, numerous private care providers intend to adopt advanced applications on a massive scale to improve their practice workflow.
The Medical App Development Market
mHealth is continuously developing and people prefer to download and utilize mHealth applications frequently. This area is continuously developing at a rapid pace and, many people download and use mHealth apps, the IT industry utilizing these applications to understand more about the user behaviors, popular and unpopular app features, and beyond that. Today, this knowledge is being used to focus on healthcare mobile app development arena to make these apps more popular and user-friendly. Well, let’s check the present state of the healthcare industry, with the professionals and organizations support.
Future Innovations of mHealth
We all know that many companies enter this growing space, so innovations are definitely to be occur. According to the current healthcare market scenario and the ongoing researches highlight some innovative future innovations of mHealth. In this article, we will discuss the future expectations of mHealth. These include:
Utilizing an application, a specialist will have the capacity to screen imperative signs and manifestations of patients.
Through this healthcare apps, a patient can send their ECG test report to the doctor. And the doctor can give important feedback instantly that will helpful for the patients.
Doctors can analyze moles on a patient’s body to characterize whether they are dangerous.
Checking blood pressure, controlling weight and the levels of glucose, measuring pulse and reading the oxygen immersion. This kind of monitoring process will help to avoid the occurrence of diabetes and the heart failures.
Experts believe that coming days with the support of a little chip which can easily attachable in a mobile phone that help users to check their sexually transmitted infections result instantly.
A smartphone’s camera will help the patent to complete visual acuity reading.
Monitoring lung function.
It will help to conduct heart electrophysiology.
These innovations will definitely reshape the healthcare industry. It will improve the patient health and also maintain a proper way of doctor and patient communication. As well as coming healthcare application development is increasing efficiency in the sector of healthcare. Undoubtedly, healthcare apps are effective, user-friendly, and profitable it can break all the geographical boundaries. This advanced features will incite the startups and entrepreneurs to enter or invest this his rapidly expanding marketplace.
In just a few short years, we’ve witnessed the smartphone’s rise from bleeding-edge innovation to household fixture. We’ve watched it permeate every industry, establishing itself as essential to how we interact and operate, to the point where we’ve come to define our times by it—this is the smartphone age.
But mobile technology’s diffusion into the mainstream hasn’t been uniform. Some industries have greeted the mobile revolution with open arms, while others have resisted this paradigm shift (to varying degrees of success).
The healthcare sector falls somewhere in between, and that’s a cause for serious concern. After all, the purpose of technology is to improve the quality of our lives, our society, and our human experience, and it’s alarming that health care—arguably the most direct way to do just that—isn’t leveraging mobile tech to its full potential.
Hospitals, clinics, and other care facilities are facing challenges when it comes to successful mobile health (or mHealth) solutions. And as a mobile app development company with an extensive background in the medical sector, Codal has a few ideas about how to cure this smartphone affliction.
Is There A Doctor In The House?
Just like a doctor diagnosing a patient, let’s start by ruling out what isn’t the issue.
This year, popular medical publication Physicians Practicesurveyed 187 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers to find that a massive 75.9 percent of them said their facility used some form of mHealth on weekly basis. Safe to say, adoption isn’t the problem here.
But the same survey found that the majority of those care facilities were using those solutions between just 0 and 5 hours a week. They might have access to mHealth solutions, but they certainly aren’t using them in their day-to-day practices. The question is why.
The brass of these hospitals certainly doesn’t need to be convinced— not if over 75 percent of them are willing to invest in mHealth solutions. But perhaps we need to dig deeper. Perhaps it’s the physicians themselves who aren’t willing to implement these smartphone tools in their workflows.
But another recent study, this one conducted by the American Medical Association, found that 85 percent of 1300 physicians surveyed believed that digital health solutions gave them an advantage in their ability to care for their patients. The figure attached illustrates a more in-depth breakdown of these findings.
The AMA’s study went even further, attempting to identify exactly what attracted these physicians to digital tools like mHealth. The primary reasons cited were improving work efficiency, enhancing diagnostic ability, and most importantly, increasing patient safety. And these were just the most popular factors—the full responses are a laundry list of the benefits mHealth solutions offer.
Another notable conclusion was the high amount of younger physicians that were especially optimistic about the impact digital tools could have. This finding suggests that these solutions are indeed the future of medical practice in the healthcare sector.
So if everything is pointing towards mHealth dominating hospitals and clinics across the country, why isn’t it? If it’s not the higher-ups or the users themselves, what’s left? The quality of the mHealth solutions themselves.
Gone are the days when people had to rush to the doctor for regular checkups or medications. Now, with technological advancements, they don’t need to go to the hospital for every small or big health issue. All these are possible because of smartphones. Smartphones have now become a perfect mHealth tool for customized medicine, sending targeted information as well as notification and collecting individual data. Do you know what the best part is? The data that are being used in order to boost population health programs, is getting huge success.
The reason behind the success of this population health messaging using smartphones is simple. An estimated 96 percent of people around the world are using smartphones. This makes it easier for mHealth messaging programs to reach almost all the people in a defined population. Compared to phone calls, people, these days, are making more use of texting and emails to communicate. This has let the healthcare providers create customized and interactive messages that are rich in content and that drives engagement. There are many population health programs that are based on mHealth such as maternal health, smoking, infant health, physical activity, weight loss as well as depression or anxiety. There are also other programs that give people a reminder to visit a doctor for checkups of their children. Some others include programs that are aimed at chronic populations with asthma, diabetes or HIV.
According to a recent study, 91 percent of people admitted that their knowledge of IEHP services was improved with text messages. Compared to a control group, their engagement rate was 2.5 times better. Also, among them, 10 percent participated in a series of health challenges, while one-third completed the challenges. It can be said that there are mainly two reasons why this text messaging became so popular:
About 98 percent of people read it
Text messaging is used by almost 80 percent of the U.S.’ Medicaid population
According to experts, if healthcare providers are going to use mHealth messaging, then they may follow the below-mentioned tips in order to create an effective engagement platform –
Tell patients what they need to do to get the desired results
What if the patients do not understand what their doctors want them to do and why? This is why it is important that you teach the patients very well as to why and what they need to do so that they can properly follow the care instructions. You can provide them with supplemental information or clarify instructions that were given to them at the time of face-to-face office visit. This way, they will get to know what exactly they need to do with the new medical device. Ask them questions regarding the instructions that have been given and clear their doubts if they have any.
Mobile technology is impacting every element of American healthcare–from insurance and billing to documentation and caregiving, the impacts are being felt. The truly transformative element of the mobile revolution is not the technology itself, or the way it changes the look and feel of the tasks it affects. Despite complaints of the depersonalizing effect of technology, the ultimate value of mobile in the sector will be how it enhances and encourages communication.
Providers are Going Mobile
Already, flexibility and functionality have already drawn providers to mobile devices and solutions. Voice-to-text technology and similar automated solutions are in the offing to relieve the documentation burden that has dampered some amount of enthusiasm toward digitization. Bolstered by these advancements, caregivers will go from subjects of their EHRs to masters of patient encounters.
One of the huge benefits of mobility–as opposed to simply being networked on desktop computers or having a digital health records solution–is the capacity for greater native customization and app development. Native apps are like the currency of the mobile, smart device world providers are entering. Developers can deliver personal, branded interfaces that allow doctors to choose precisely how they want their dashboards to look, giving their EHRs a custom touch that has been sorely lacking throughout their implementation.
App-centric development will further reduce the friction of adoption and utilization, giving doctors a sense of empowerment and investment, rather than the bland inertia that has carried digitization thus far.
The personalization of the technology through app development will help boost adoption, and return the focus to what the technology enables, rather than how it looks or what it has replaced. Mobile technology’s strength will be in reconnecting doctors and patients, and creating bridges of data and communication across the continuum of care.
