healthcare technology

When it comes to designing, developing and building new mobile healthcare tools, many of the most successful ventures typically have one factor in common: accredited healthcare expertise.

Proof is evident in the foray the Mayo Clinic has made with mHealth technology, as well as other pilots and deployments led by the healthcare institution and providers.

"Our culture of learning, innovation, and the desire to find answers has allowed Mayo to remain at the forefront of health and wellness, and we want to extend this expertise to people anywhere," Paul Limburg, M.D., medical director of Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions, said in an announcement. "We collaborated with and invested in Better to create a powerful way for people to connect with Mayo Clinic in their homes and communities, wherever they are."

Other top medical institutions are also finding success with mHealth initiatives. For instance, Steven J. Hardy, Ph.D., a pediatric psychologist at Children's National Health System in the District of Columbia, wants to engage families and patients in conversations about how they're managing illness and use mobile gaming as the tool to do so.

Speaking with FierceMobileHealthcare in an exclusive interview, Hardy discussed a pilot the hospital is conducting for children with sickle cell disease. The kids play a game on a mobile platform (in this case, an iPad) that helps them with an often-overlooked symptom of sickle cell disease--memory loss.

And a Harvard Innovation Lab startup aims to bolster patient treatment by enhancing coordination and communication among caregivers with an mHealth app that lets healthcare teams text, share images and videos and always have a patient list within reach.

Read more: http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/why-medical-expertise-must-have-mhealth-tech-development/2014-06-09

While much is made of the mHealth app market for consumers, a growing segment is being tailored for clinicians. Doctors are becoming as mobile as their patients, and they need the tools to access medical information as well.

Vendors are already moving in that direction, too. Take Orca Health, for instance, which has developed a platform of iOS 7 apps designed to help clinicians educate patients about certain conditions or medical procedures. The Patient Education for Healthcare Professionals platform, which currently features 10 apps, allows physicians to choose and edit medical content, capture photos and videos and securely send that information to the patient — in essence, enabling the physician to prescribe an app.

"Patient education is a monster, monster problem," said Matt Berry, Orca Health's founder and CEO, in an interview with mHealth News.

Patient engagement, defined as the process of placing patients at the center and in control of their own healthcare, is becoming a chief healthcare priority

Concurrently, a number of national information infrastructure initiatives are targeting increased patient engagement and the design of health information systems that improve the availability of health information and integrate it in meaningful ways for patients.  So far, these technology goals have been advanced primarily through the design of personal health records (PHRs), patient portals, electronic health records (EHRs), and health information exchanges (HIEs).  However, we remain far from achieving the goal of truly engaging patients in their care.

Generation and exchange of health data with patients is a requirement for Stage 3 EHR meaningful use incentives. Patients are entitled to an electronically generated copy of the record of their encounters with providers. 

Sharing provider-generated data with patients is expected to promote patient engagement and accountability, but our own experiences suggest that the data that are being shared are currently a mixed blessing.  For example, one encounter report took the form of a 6-page document in which the vast majority of information was copied and pasted from previous encounters and in which there were several factual errors. The errors will be discussed with the provider during the next visit.

Certainly the report got our attention; whether empowerment will result remains an open question.  On another occasion, although the visit itself had included making decisions about future treatment, the plan was not mentioned in the document, leaving the patient to rely on her own memory and notes.

A recent international survey by the McKinsey & Company consulting firm addresses some myths about consumer use of digital healthcare services.

Many healthcare executives believe that, due to the sensitive nature of medical care, patients don’t want to use digital services except in a few specific situations. Decision makers often cite relatively low usage of digital healthcare services. Results of this survey however reveal something quite different. 

The 5 myths debunked by this survey are as follows

Myth 1: People don’t want to use digital services for healthcareMyth 2: Only young people want to use digital services

More at http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/gallery/5-myths-about-consumer-use-of-digital-healthcare-services-48388-1.html

Smart devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs have become an integral part of everyday life as well as for professional applications. This is also true for medicine .

To enhance patient safety for medical apps or health apps that are to be used successfully in today’s medical settings, a good information policy should always be part of the marketing strategy. Patients and doctors that are well informed about the benefits, limits, and risks of an app are in a better position to give more reasoning to their decisions whether they want to use it in a medical context or not.

To address the current shortcomings concerning the way information about apps is provided to potential users of apps, Lewis, in a recent letter to JMIR, proposed a set of standard criteria analogous to those published by the Health on the Net foundation to be used for assessing the utility of medical apps based on a systematic self-certification model.

He suggested using a central platform for this purpose, for example, the United Kingdom National Health Service App Store, to allow registered developers of mobile medical apps to highlight the fact that they conform to these criteria. This would probably also give developers and distributors of such apps an advantage over their competitors.

There are already a number of existing initiatives and projects that use almost identical criteria to those suggested by Lewis, for example, the “Apps Peer-Review” by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) launched in 2013. The JMIR mHealth disclosure form also covers many of the concerns mentioned in the proposed app synopsis.

Mostly, these projects reach this goal by installing certification and/or (third party) review processes and publishing the corresponding evaluation results using specific channels (eg, their own webpage or scientific journals).

The app synopsis could be seen as a “first level” approach according to criteria already specified by previous projects dealing with quality assurance for Web-based information sources, though its focus is slightly different. At first, it could serve to provide all interested parties with sufficient information that, in addition to providing customers with basic information about an app, can then also be used as a starting point for building tests (eg, to identify the appropriate reviewers and testing methods, independent of the business model or revenue strategy that is employed by each respective initiative).

The current market players come from different backgrounds and thus also have different interests in mind. In Germany, for example, there are some initiatives focusing mainly on a single disease while others target health apps in general. Also, their funding strategies differ significantly, ranging from privately funded initiatives or publicly financed institutions to companies that are being paid on a case-by-case basis.

If manufacturers were to publish the necessary information following this app synopsis, both they as well as the users would clearly benefit. Users would receive a complete and easily comprehensible set of information that would support them in their decision making process while manufacturers would be able to follow the simple structure of the synopsis to compile the necessary information without expending too much effort since they only have to compile information that should already be available to them.

Although this is not equivalent to an officially sanctioned certification process, information published according to the synopsis could nevertheless serve as a reference if there are any disputes between both sides.

more at http://www.jmir.org/2013/12/e277/