Three years ago the most heard buzzword in the Health sector was the e-Patient, but today with the emergence of mobile Internet access, self-care has been revolutionized with a massive number of mobile-health apps becoming quickly popular.
With more
than 8000 apps in Apple Store under the category “Health and Fitness” and more
than 5000 under “Medical”, people can use apps to monitor their sport
activities, to play social games for dietary objectives with fellows, to prevent
mental problems,
and a large list …
But
secondly and most important, today’s
smartphones’ capabilities, camera, voice, etc… can reduce a lot of unnecessary medical encounters. A smartphone is a quite complete medical
device that can be
used to share pictures of the evolution of their stains on the skin with their
family doctors, or scars and stitches when in the post-surgery period. It can
be connected to a meter readings from a multitude of
FDA-cleared glucose meters into the mobile devices using an app as Gloko that
are later transmitted to a monitoring web-based service managed by health
professionals.
The other side of this revolution is its impact
on medical care process. Now the trigger of a medical act is not the result of a
limited number of doctor-patient encounters, but any event that may be
transmitted by a mobile device and requires a medical action.
Such amount of Big Data and of new health events and signals requires an immediate rethinking of IT infrastructure to make an effective use of medical specialist time including:
- Security challenges to access large Data Centers in the Cloud from mobile devices·
- Solutions to store and analyse Big Medical Data
- Modern Business Process Modelling Solutions to cascade and control required medical actions in an error-free manner reducing manual intervention and errors
Definitely we will see changes among public and private health providers that need to understand not only the new opportunities offered by technology to be more efficient and to reduce cost, but the underlying IT infrastructure requirements to cope with the new App-Patients processes.
Recommended Links:
Goodbye ePatient, welcome app-patient (Spanish)