They use them to remotely monitor a hospitalized patient’s vital signs, to get access to data in patients’ files, and even sometimes just to talk.
Mobile phones and doctors are increasingly becoming BFFs. But patients far outnumber physicians when it comes to using them, according to a story by Joseph Conn at modernhealthcare.com.
Because they’re miniaturized and require little energy to operate, they can bring all kinds of services “to the patient in ways never before possible,” according to Francis Collins at Scientific American.
Collins revealed that researchers found that consumers were “far out front of providers in their acceptance of and demands for mobile health services, while developing nations were adopting mobile health much faster than in the U.S. and other more developed counterparts.”
So why aren’t physicians rushing to the app store?
“The main barriers are not the technology,” but rather the healthcare industry's “inherent resistance to change,” said David Levy, M.D., PwC's global healthcare leader.
“It's kind of like a wild, wild West in the mobile health space,” Lee Perlman, president of GNYHA Ventures, a subsidiary of the Greater New York Hospital Association, told Conn. “We've tried to put some rationale to it.”
Maybe doctors aren’t quite embracing mobile phones because of the dearth of apps out there. How about 13,600 consumer apps vs. an estimated 5,200 when MobilHealthNews, a mobile health market research company based in Cambridge, Mass., surveyed the market in April?
Maybe it’s because the need isn’t out there. Demand for mobile apps has not yet peaked, said Dr. Jonathan Bertman, founder of Amazing Charts, North Kingston, R.I., a developer of EHR systems for smaller physician practices.
Privacy and security concerns are also still an issue. “So often we hear about the breaches of the scale you just can't imagine,” Bertman told Conn.
And then there’s the issue of the new BYOD, or “Bring Your Own Device,” policy in place at many hospitals, “in which clinical staffers can use the smartphone or tablet of their choice, creating the possibility even more for breaches, because they’re often not encrypted.
Kevin Kwang of ZDNet said they’re actually a liability, and will be until technology matures or becomes secure enough to safeguard organizations' corporate networks.
One final problem: For now, many leading IT vendors are doing a poor job of integrating mobile health apps into their systems, Conn wrote, adding that neither they nor providers “have figured out yet what to do with incoming patient-generated data,” founder and managing partner, John Moore, of Chilmark, a health IT market research firm in Cambridge, Mass., told Conn in an interview.
So for now, it’s a wait-and-see game, lots of issues needing to be resolved, but also lots of promise, for healthcare providers in the mobile apps arena.
Edited by
Braden Becker
