Many countries around the world (and the USA is no exception) are trying very hard to provide adequate patient care regardless of physical distance between patients and healthcare providers, lack of trained medical personnel, and skyrocketing medical equipment, pharmaceutical, and service costs. Fortunately, the mobile world has a lot to offer, revolutionizing the way in which doctors diagnose, treat, and communicate with their patients. Indeed, mobile devices can connect patients with their healthcare providers, enable timely health monitoring, and give around-the-clock access to medical records and other essential information, thus improving health outcomes and lowering costs.
As mobile health applications and services are becoming an essential tool in bettering health care around the world, researchers are getting increasingly interested in how potent mobile health solutions can become in the near future. Thus, for example, New Manhattan Research Study , conducted by Decision Resources Group and commissioned by Manhattan Research, has recently found that many physicians believe in digital communication technologies, including mobile apps, as powerful tools for improving patient outcomes. According to this study, forty-seven percent of doctors owning smart phones had shown patients images or videos on their devices, and more than a third of physicians had recommended that patients use health apps in the past year. Moreover, American Food and Drug Administration has shared research findings according to which about 500 million smart phone users (medical professionals,consumers, and patients) worldwide are going to regularly access health care applications by 2015, and by 2018, over 1.7 billion mobile device users will have downloaded mobile medical applications.
“The mobile revolution is everywhere around us,” notes Joseph Kvedar, MD, an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Connected Health (CCH) at Massachusetts General Hospital and, a unit of Partners Healthcare in Boston. “It’s all about mobile now, and physicians can’t help but notice that, and they feel they have to get involved in some way.” And many physicians are surely noticing this but often hesitate to “prescribe” a certain app as they are not quite sure how trustworthy it is. “There’s a fear of liability if they don’t know what they’re talking about. So they tend to be very general and say, ‘It’s probably worth looking at this category to help you track something because you need to lose 10 pounds or you need to be more active, explains Joseph Kvedar.
That said, FDA has already started to assure safety and effectiveness of currently available mobile health applications and on September 25, 2013 issued Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff . In this document, the agency describes what medical apps it will regulate, for which FDA will exercise enforcement discretion, and what mobile apps are not considered medical devices. The FDA page devoted to mobile medical applications also lists examples of each app category and what mobile health applications have been already cleared or approved. These regulations have very important implications for the medical mobile application industry as they allow physicians to make well-advised choices while choosing healthcare apps for their patients. On the other hand, if doctors prescribe certain medical apps, these apps are more likely to be trusted by patients.
Now let us discuss specific benefits that mobile healthcare applications offer.
- 1. Medical apps give patients access to reliable healthcare information, help them manage their chronic conditions, allow patients to keep track of doctor appointments and medications, and let them find physicians and nearest hospital locations with the touch of a button.
- 2. Mobile health applications allow 24/7 access to reference materials, lab tests, and medical records.
- 3. 80% of instances of diabetes, heart disease and strokes can be prevented by better self- care, and mobile apps allowing patients to easily monitor their blood sugar, blood pressure, and weight can be indispensable tools for high-risk patients.
- 4. Medical applications let doctors and nurses address medical conditions through near real-time monitoring and treatment regardless of the location of the patient and healthcare provider.
- 5. With the ever-growing knowledge about diseases, genetics, and pharmaceutical products, it can be particularly challenging for physicians to keep up with the latest advances in medicine and apply that information to their patients. Health mobile apps that help doctors understand how to deal with particular symptoms and what drugs they should avoid can be incredibly useful, especially when doctors diagnose and treat patients in the field.
These are just a few ways in which mobile health applications can assist patients and healthcare workers, help provide better care, and lower costs. The length of this paper doesn’t allow mentioning them all, nor is it possible since the use of a mobile app highly depends on each specific case. This leads to another consideration: health care professionals are best suited for designing healthcare apps as only they know exactly what a new medical application should be like. Fortunately, codeless app platforms allow building high quality custom mobile applications without any programming skills. Moreover, such codeless app platforms as the ultrafast Snappii’s codeless platform save thousands of dollars on building a mobile application and, unlike traditional app building methods, let one deliver a polished app in days, not moths.
Snappii is ultrafast mobile app development without coding.
Snappii offers mobile apps for the healthcare industry as a convenient and easyto-use mobile solution that will save time and reduce costs, simplify medical data sharing among healthcare professionals and patients, and, as a result, will improve treatment outcomes.
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