Dive Brief:
- A Commonwealth Fund study concludes that mobile clinical apps have great potential to help manage chronic illness and expand access to care.
- However, several factors hold back widespread use of mobile apps for chronic disease management, including a failure to interoperate with EMRs and concerns over reimbursement for time spent using these apps.
- According to the researchers, if the above problems were addressed, and a regulatory framework developed that standardized development of such apps for consistent performance, apps could transform all of healthcare.
Dive Insight:
As attractive as the prospects are for clinical apps, the obstacles that stand between them and wide use are fairly significant. After all, a failure to pay doctors for time spend doing mobile-based care gives them little incentive to explore this mode of care. Another issue is coping with the flood of data these devices produce; even if it's neatly packaged in the EMR, doctors struggle to digest yet another data stream. The bottom line is that that there's some major obstacles to mobile care, as attractive as it may appear.