Mar 1
2018
Hospitals Have A Smartphone Problem
By Sean McGowan, writer, Codal Inc.
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 Practice surveyed 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.
