As per a PwC Canada report, around 50% Canadians consider that mobile health applications will make healthcare more convenient in the next 3 years. More and more conventional healthcare professionals are already widening their health services by recommending consumers the use of handy mobile apps. While around 50% of patients think that mobile applications will enhance the quality of healthcare, the recent study has also found that 59% of doctors think that while mobile application is inevitable, mainstream acceptance will take a little time.
THE POPULARITY OF MOBILE HEALTH / MEDICAL APPS
The practice of utilizing mobile devices, such as PDAs, smartphones, and tablets, for the purpose of health services and information has attained the name of mobile health (or mHealth). Thus, mHealth apps enable patients to manage as well as improve health through collecting information on their vital signs and providing it to practitioners with the aim to receive the suitable treatment or consultations. However, not just patients are taking benefit of mobile technologies, as mHealth apps are significantly designed for healthcare experts, including clinicians, doctors, and nurses that necessitate real-time access to histories, appointment schedules, billing data, drug prescription details, and other practice relevant information of patients.
A great number of medical institutions and companies have already known the potential of mobile apps for healthcare. They assign budgets and then invest in building medical applications for mobile devices, such as, Blackberry, iPhone, Android, and other popular smartphones, PDAs, tablets. At the present time there exist thousands of mobile health applications. Such apps are developed for the below mentioned purposes:
- Mobile applications offer healthcare professionals with concurrent access to the patient’s medical records and facilitate tracking their symptoms, physical state indicators, nutrition habits, disease flow etc.
- Mobile healthcare applications allow communication between nurses, doctors and other healthcare specialists, for instance, by discussions of medical issues in the online forums.
- Such apps improve such processes as scheduling and billing, drug interaction checking and medication prescribing.
- Healthcare apps can assist in epidemic outbreak estimate and monitoring.
- Smatphone applications can grant users with the information regarding local healthcare facilities, and also with an access to a searchable database of existing physicians, cosmetologists, dentists, etc.
- Mobile applications may help to the promotion of wellness awareness and healthcare education.
In this manner, the best features of mHealth applications lead to the efficiency improvement of healthcare businesses, and also to the increase of medical information collection as well as transmission, since these applications allow healthcare professionals to work distantly and still to access the vital medical data. This gets it possible to offer customers with treatment and diagnostic support.
The technical level of mHealth applications is increasing and they are getting more sophisticated. Hence it is no surprise that mobile apps are redefining the traditional doctor-patient relationship and also the healthcare industry overall in managing patient outcomes. Feel free to contact Continuum Software Solutions, Toronto for free consultation for your next mobile health application project at info@continuumsoft.ca
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