Healthcare

mHealth: the icing on the Health IT cake

The effective application of information technology solutions for healthcare is delivering great value. Web-based monitoring solutions for better in-home care and emerging medical home applications that enable improved care coordination for co-morbid patients seeing multiple care providers are good examples. One area with an abundance of evidence of the improvement that information technology has had in health care is Telemedicine. Starting with simple two-way video hook ups, Telemedicine has improved dramatically with new technologies and has been increasingly leveraged to deliver better care to under-served, often rural communities where care is needed. As a nod to its value, some states have recently passed laws to improve insurance coverage of Telemedicine services, signaling increasing use and acceptance. And the power of Telemedicine to change possibilities for care in parts of the developing world and to conflict zones can hardly be overstated. mHealth holds the promise of leveraging adopted health information technology as well as mobile technology and infrastructure to bring health care places and people who cannot access health care easily.

Yet for all its promise, the adoption of healthcare technology by providers has been impeded by other factors. One such factor is the generally acknowledged resistance by care providers to information technology changes. To a degree, this resistance is due to two main challenges: the loss of productivity when changes are implemented and the often high capital costs for some enterprise information technology solutions that smaller or mid-sized practices are unable to shoulder or stomach. SaaS solutions have met the latter challenge by lowering the costs that have been one barrier to entry by not requiring separate and costly individual installations of solutions for each care provider or practice. Some reports suggest that such SaaS solutions are already reducing this provider resistance to technology adoption. The former challenge is being addressed more gradually by improved workflow and user experience design. These growing disciplines are delivering better solutions whose improved design minimizes the inevitable loss of productivity experienced while care providers, like adopters, are learning to use a new workflow or tool.

Atop these shifts in healthcare empowered by information technology, mobile health applications promise to be great catalysts for increased adoption and impact. With people being increasingly comfortable using smartphones for data applications and not just voice, it makes the adoption of information technology in general and mobile technology in particular easier in the healthcare industry. Mobile technology is particularly applicable to healthcare due to the significant cost, time, and inconvenience that are incurred in just transporting patients to doctors for those consultations that do not need to be in-person. Research by TripleTree presents a good analysis of the market and opportunities in mHealth. Technology and wireless phone companies also see the posibilities for healthcare and are now beginning to move to deliver solutions. For those whom might resist adopting health information technology, mHealth promises to bring health information technology to them.

Tags: health information technology, Health IT, HIT, mhealth, mobile health

I am 5 foot, 11.75 inches tall; I enjoy helping clients and people I work with to achieve their objectives; believe that technology is a great enabler for the improved delivery of health care in the world, as it can be for so many other things.