Your Health is now really in your Hands

Sitting in the comfort of your home and with the push of a button, the app starts working and records all your necessary health vitals.

The 74-year old Gargi Malhotra no longer rushes to a hospital to get her blood sugar levels checked. She can monitor it anytime, anywhere via her smartphone using the iGlucoCheck app. There are apps to measure your blood pressure, ECG and transmit it to a reading station and et al. A nurse in a hospital also uses an iOS application to view and update the patient vitals, charts and their records from their iPhone/iPad thereby, not only improving efficiency but also enhancing patient care delivery. For providers too, it opens up a host of opportunities to interact with patients, improve the quality of care, and reduce the overall cost of care. They are leveraging mHealth to bring information to consumers and offer therapeutic solutions that complement traditional treatments, often saving consumers time and money.

From facilitating doctors and patients to anywhere, anytime access to crucial patient information, and monitoring patient’s vitals, providing real-time updates, to quick decision-making, the mobile driven healthcare is a new paradigm emerging in the healthcare industry. “All technology available is in nascent stages. The possibilities are endless and we are starting to explore them,” adds Rajesh Batra, VP-IT, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Hospital.

Simply! our health has gone mobile.

How mHealth is Tranforming Lives

According to a report by research4guidance, the mHealth apps can help in reducing non-compliance and hospital readmission costs by as many as 55%. And the major drivers of mHealth solutions in India include cost-effectiveness, ready access to medical information, and access to otherwise unavailable information. Mobile EHRs, remote monitoring, care team collaboration, tele-consultation, bedside patient information capture, and secure communication with patients are also among the areas of promise for providers.

With more and more people using such apps, the number of mHealth apps too has doubled in 2.5 years to reach more than 100,000 apps. These apps are predominantly targetting chronically ill patients (31%) and health and fitness-interested people (28%).

Right from patient appointments to doctors consult and sending/receiving diagnostic reports, every aspect of business in the healthcare domain shows some implementation of mobile technologies. The technological advancement has opened up a pleothra of benefits including the speed at which you can access data has now improved. More patients records can be handled at the same time, more data analysis is possible with greater degree of accuracy. If data is digitized well, it can help raise red flags on the patient’s condition effectively. Telemedicine and remote monitoring especially at the ICU level are increasingly benefiting from mobile technologies.

This consumerization is transforming the entire healthcare ecosystem, involving individuals as never before in the management of their own healthcare. Payers are tapping technology to empower members (users/patients) to become their own health ambassadors for improved health outcomes. According to a study, 86% of clinicians already use smartphones in their professional acitivities. There has been a significant increase in the use of tablets to interact with EHRs.

Sundar Subramanian, Senior Vice President, Healthcare, Cognizant adds, “Consumers’ widespread use of mobile devices makes it easier and faster to access healthcare and creates opportunities to revolutionize the industry through high-quality and highly personalized care and patient self-help apps.”

Where does India Stand

Industry research indicates that ICT spending in the healthcare ecosystem has grown by 12% over the last year.

A recent survey by IDC reveals that nearly 29% of the respondents from healthcare provider organizations have some level of mobility in place while another nearly 28% have plans to adopt mobile technologies in the next 18 months. And, 27.8% of the healthcare organizations do not have any plans for any mobility solution adoption.

Sash Mukherjee, Research Manager, IDC Health Insights, said, “Healthcare IT is at a relatively nascent stage of adoption in India, especially compared to the potential, there have been several instances of innovative implementations and best practices in India. The growth of the private corporate entities in healthcare has fared well for IT implementation in the industry.”

The proliferation of mobile device is pretty high and the proliferation of apps in mobile space is also very high.

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan also adds that India’s adoption is late but it is definitly encouraging. Though the mobile technology in healthcare space is not as much traction as app of an ecommerce company would do but looking at the usage pattern of my own hospital, the usage pattern is pretty good and high.

Challenges

Mobility in healthcare is very much dependent on usage of smartphone devices. Though 69% of Indian households have access to mobile phones but only 20% has access to smartphone devices, as per an Industry reports on mobile usage.

Moreover, there is a significant difference in usage patterns between the urban and rural areas. This can become a handicap in terms of the reach to a larger segment in the country considering the patient side of the ecosystem.

According to a report titled ‘Global Mobile Health Market Report 2013-2017’, The mHealth app market will reach $26bn by 2017, but only 0.5% share of the global healthcare market.

“The biggest challenge is legacy of systems in older institutions, which operate in silos (with very little integration) and were never built for mobile devices,” adds Vikas Sachdeva, CIO, HealthCare at Home.

“Another barrier to mHealth adoption is that the Indian population is accustomed to receiving personal attention and some of the mHealth applications to today cannot meet that expectation, as they are predominantly one-way channels of access information. When the remote care delivery support infrastructure picks up to allow a seamless two-way engagement between patients and providers, we can expect increased adoption,” adds Subramanian of Cognizant.

Language diversity and illiteracy are another important factors impacting mHealth adoption. Cost and innovation requirement are the biggest challenges in implementing mobility solutions. Innovation is still driven by the US and devices are getting manufactured in developed markets, and adjusting costs to the local environment is still a factor.

Bandwidth is also another issue. Reliability of patients power is also a question which brings up the difficulties in handling remote healthcare monitoring, adds Dalip Singh Negi, CTO, Portea Medical.

From a provider standpoint, the absence of a central repository of patient data (across care settings) that is accessible to patients and providers limits the use of the latest technologies (such as analytics and mobility) for efficient outcomes.

Outlook

Considering the vastness of the country and the lack of adequate access to healthcare, there is a vast scope for remote monitoring and specialist consultations. Pools of doctors are setting up ICUs and tying up with hospitals whereby their patients can be monitored 24/7. Consumer engagement and retention areas are now opening up new focus areas with healthcare organizations. In total, the variety of mHealth solutions available will support provider clinical and financial goals by empowering people with the actionable decision support, convenience, and control that they desire. And can be a big time game changer.