Over the last few years, the number of consumers and professionals using mobile health has grown dramatically and is expected to build over the next five or six years. Observers say that the mobile health marketplace will eventually be as established as a part of the health care business as a stethoscope. In fact, San Francisco-based market analysis and consulting firm Grand View Research estimates the global mHealth market will hit $49.1 billion by 2020, according to Health IT News.
And here's what Pricewaterhousecoopers had to say about mHealth's future.
I'm not going to argue with those who say that it will take some doing for mHealth to blossom. Without a doubt, it will take a great deal of technical integration, use of new wireless platforms, investment in new mobile health tools for nurses and doctors, mobile health setups in the homes of patients to follow their progress and more.
The transition will also require health care professionals, especially nurses and doctors, to change the way they think about their work. They'll be integrating mobile phones in new ways, such as secure messaging between colleagues and communicating via smart phone with those off-site—responding to alerts from their colleagues and wireless devices monitoring patients.
No, what I'm saying is that a lot of these functionalities need come faster than the five-to-10-year range many analysts have set, for reasons that include the following:
- To leverage the enormous investment hospitals had made in EMRs, they will have to take portable devices in hand quickly and integrate them intelligently with the EMR. This is urgent: a "must have" rather than a "nice to have."
- As medical devices go, mobile phones and tablets are cheap. While buying them on a large scale is certainly a big spend, doctors and nurses will have an easier time doing their job and their enhanced productivity can go straight to the bottom line.
- With pressure on hospitals and doctors to keep patients from returning to the hospital quickly, monitoring patients at home should happen soon rather than later, as it saves both money and lives. In one striking case, cardiac rehab patients at The Mayo Clinic who used the daily mHealth monitoring app were much less likely to be readmitted in three months, according to news from EHR Intelligence.
- A large percentage of health care professionals have come to rely on apps that do everything from tracking a patient's blood glucose levels to offering continuing medical education, and they aren't going to wait five to 10 years to get apps from their practice or hospital that make this specific job easier.
While health IT management is a difficult job in the best of circumstances, and much harder with EMR implementation afoot, mHealth has firmly arrived and must be addressed. Given the levels of financial and operational benefit that can come from proper use of mobile devices, there's no excuse for waiting years to make them one of the center foci of your health IT strategy.