Healthcare Technology Featured Article

January 15, 2021

5 Benefits of Mobile Health Care Apps for the 2020s and Beyond




The digital age has finally caught up with modern health care. Mobile apps for healthcare professionals who work in hospitals, medical practices, elder care facilities, and even physician owned multi-specialty provider groups like that of Daiya Health Care, are becoming more and more normalized, creating what medical writer and marketing specialist, Will Kelly, calls the ultimate mobile medical workforce. Says Kelly, medical mobile apps are desk free and provide instantaneous collaboration between patient and doctor. They also provide instant information/data retrieval. In terms of economics, the global mobile health care app industry was said to be worth around $28 billion in 2018 and is presently expected to grow to over $100 billion by 2023. That’s an annual growth rate of about 29 percent as indicated by Research and Markets.

Mobile apps are valuable to health care professionals and patients alike since they provide secure retrieval of patient health information (PHI) not only from anywhere in a medical setting and/or practice, but also from home. Naturally, all mobile healthcare apps in the US must be HIPAA compliant which means commercial consumer apps will not meet the safety standards.

So then, what are some of the greatest benefits of mobile healthcare apps for 2020 and beyond? Here’s 5 of them.

  1. Mobile Health Care Apps Provide Secure and Simple Mobile Clinical Communications

According to Kelly, unified communications solutions are considered the standard when it comes to collaboration platforms for both health care workers and patients alike. Naturally, healthcare security is of the utmost importance and mobile apps help to provide a secure solution since the apps provide a direct line of secure communication between patient and provider. They also provide simplicity by combining single-purpose apps under a single use interface, Kelly goes on. This promotes staff efficiency.   

  1. Mobile Health Care Apps Provide Mobile Telemedicine Video Chat Capabilities

Telemedicine and mobile chat capabilities have become fashionable in the age of Covid-19. Going forward, mobile health care apps are said to be playing a greater role in telemedicine. Because of mobile apps, a physician who is presently on-call for telemedicine work can then simply initiate a patient conference on their smartphone and/or tablet, rather than having to be sitting at their desk, accessing their PC. The quality of these digital telemedicine communication tools will be improving with faster internet speeds and the introduction of 5G.   

  1. Mobile Healthcare Apps Improve Patient/Physician Engagement

By nature, physicians are very busy people, running from one emergency to another. Tools like mobile healthcare apps are able to improve patient engagement since they are so easy to use while on the go. On top of this, hospitals are required to track patient outcomes in order to meet Affordable Care Act compliance—something that will once again become important with the new Presidential Administration now sworn into office. That said, a new generation of mobile health care apps are about to be launched that provide performance metrics, patient feedback, and that also zero in on gaps in workflow. This will allow a doctor or nursing supervisor to track patient information and metrics on their smartphone while grabbing a coffee or making dinner at home.

  1.   Mobile Healthcare Apps Provide Improved Health Information Systems

Mobile devices are becoming more powerful with every generation introduced. Also with secure Wi-Fi, MDM, and geofencing now established, greatly improved Health Information Systems (HIS) is inevitable, or so Kelly insists. Healthcare workers are better able to access EHRs via mobile health care apps that maintain secure links to back-end cloud systems.   

  1. Mobile Healthcare Apps Provide Better Patient Scheduling

Hospitals are chaotic under the best of circumstances with nurses and doctors working all sorts of odd shifts, which means patient scheduling can be challenging to say the least. But now there’s a new class of apps being developed that will allow nurses and other healthcare professionals to post their scheduled shifts for weeks or even months in advance. The new apps utilize special algorithms to recognize their most common shifts and also sends information directly to staff managers should changes in shifts occur.  

As mobile healthcare apps mature, there is little doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a larger and larger role in their future development. Some medical professionals fear that AI could eliminate some or many of their jobs. This is just one challenge the healthcare industry will have to get a handle on before the AI powered mobile apps become all too commonplace. The good news however, is that mobile healthcare apps provide much more efficient, secure, and cohesive patient care by distributing data in real-time, on a physician’s or nurse’s smartphone.   



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