We always tend to use our phones, at least once, to carry out some health-related task, whether it is to show your physician an image related to your health concern or a prescription or to find a new specialist for any health issue.?Now imagine if the entire healthcare could function with this kind of convenience.?
mHealth is based on this exact premise. Mobile health improves patient care while reducing patient visits to the hospital. It increases the accessibility of remote healthcare, faster service, and a cheaper and quicker diagnosis to patients and doctors alike.?
A form of automated healthcare solution, mHealth apps can record and store sensitive patient data through cloud computing. This data can be shared by the patients with their healthcare providers making it easily accessible.?
A large number of the population can be without any hassle managed through virtual care options, thanks to mHealth.?
How mHealth Apps Boost Connectivity and Communication
- Telehealth Consultation: Patients can quickly consult their physician online for health concerns that don't require in-person visits. mHealth can also establish a patient engagement system that lets patients connect with their caregivers using audio and video tools.?
- Appointment Scheduling: mHealth apps allow patients to directly schedule their appointments with their physician, without the involvement of the administrative steps by following a few automated steps.?
- Improved Physician Efficiency: Physicians are often overworked and overloaded as they have to cater to a number of patients. mHealth apps can help ease their workload by collecting patient health data and transferring it directly to physicians. This enables physicians to make timely decisions and boost care delivery and efficiency.?
- Continuous Care Delivery: The nature of patient care delivery has evolved from being episodic to continuous. Healthcare professionals provide post-treatment preventive care to patients through regular check-ups. mHealth apps ease this process. They include a mechanism for prevention, treatment, and follow-up, which lets healthcare providers stay on top of patient health and outreach patients in-between visits for better care delivery.?
- Shared Health Data: It is burdensome for healthcare organizations to extract medical data from patients. On the other hand, it gets tiring for the patients to constantly provide their medical data to multiple healthcare professionals and physicians.?mHealth apps use automation that allows patients to share their health-related data with multiple healthcare providers.?
- Reduced Cancellations: Appointment cancellations cost a lot of money to healthcare organizations.?With their appointment scheduling feature, mHealth apps help notify patients about their upcoming appointments to keep up with their scheduled appointments and reduce cancellations, saving costs to the healthcare organization.
- Chatbots: Integrating chatbots into mHealth helps quickly solve patient queries. It can also be used to remind patients to take their medications on time.?
How Do mHealth Apps Aid Patient Self-Care
Traditional patient care and patient-doctor interaction were only limited to in-person appointments. mHealth apps have, however, transformed the healthcare industry.?
By embedding the right tools and technology, mHealth apps have empowered patients to take control and manage their own health efficiently. Features like an oximeter, sugar testing, activity levels, etc. can be utilized by the patient.?
- Medication Alerts: Irregularity in taking medication is one of the leading causes of deteriorating patient health. Taking the prescribed medication on time benefits not only the patient but also their healthcare provider. mHealth can be used to send out reminders to patients at scheduled timings to take their prescribed medication to prevent risk to their health.
- Fitness Tracking: mHealth applications can gather data from healthcare wearables and keep track of the patient’s diet, and health vitals such as blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, sugar levels, etc. to detect the risk of strokes, diabetes, and other health risks to patients, which can be viewed and accessed by the patients and their physician.?
- Chronic Disease Management: mHeath technologies consistently monitor patients using electronic data interchange to track symptoms of chronic diseases that help healthcare institutions deliver preventive care.
What to Consider Before Developing a mHealth Application
mHealth apps help enhance patient care and improve patient-doctor communication which further optimizes care delivery.?
As effective and efficient mHealth apps are, developing them can be a long process, especially when its challenges come to mind. One of the biggest challenges that mobile health applications face is that of regulation and compliance. Every country has its own set of rules and regulations that mobile apps need to comply with.?
Another challenge mHealth apps encounter is that of interoperability amongst devices since a lot of new devices are entering the healthcare market. It becomes challenging to keep track of all connected devices, while at the same time, ensuring they remain secure.?
Another challenge mHealth apps face is that of security. Millions of patient data are stored in these apps, and if not properly secured.?
To combat these challenges, healthcare institutions must collaborate with the right healthcare app development company that can build scalable, secure healthcare applications.?
