500 Million People to Use Mobile Health Apps by 2015

mHealth Apps Are Hot!

At the recent mHealth Summit (Mobile Health Summit) held last month in Washington, a research report was delivered, indicating that the mobile health application market is about to explode.  It predicts that by the year 2015, 500 million people will be using mobile health applications through their smartphones.

There are currently 17,000 mobile health applications available in the major app stores.  There's an app that will broadcast your heart rate over Twitter.  There are apps that will allow doctors to monitor patients remotely and then advise specialists and nurses regarding treatment.  There are stress test apps, vision and hearing test apps.  WebMD Mobile is now a very popular symptom checker app.  The list is endless as the race is on to get a piece of the anticipated explosion of mHealth market.

Interestingly enough, of the estimated 17,000 mobile applications now available, only 43% are designed for health professionals.  Indeed, many of these are free feature add-ons for enterprise systems.

The real sleeper in the area of mHealth apps are those developed for the patient (aka "the consumer").  

Creation Healthcare reports that "some of the most popular mHealth applications are those that enhance users’ lifestyle, especially when living with disease".  As an example, in a search for the term "diabetes", iPhone's App Store returns 186 possible apps.  The consumer has a voracious appetite for tools that will help in managing disease and chronic conditions, managing diet and nutrition, fitness monitoring, calculating health risk, and so much more.

RSRS understands the appetite the consumer has for information and tools concerning their healthcare.  We are seeing a dramatic increase in patients authorizing the release of copies of their medical records - to themselves.  Moreover, they're telling us that more and more, they are requesting copies of their current lab results, ECGs, x-ray and MRI reports for their own records.  They realize that these are the critical starting points in healthcare management and they want access - for themselves.  As a result, we're transferring these records digitally with encryption, often on mini CDs or secure download, allowing patients to carry their information with them.  We're seeing that patients don't even need to understand everything in the record.  They realize that "access" is more than half the battle - especially at a time when most of the 1st generation EMR's are not integrating patient access in any significant way.

The mHealth app market is here to stay.  The vendors who approach the market strategically, and consider not only healthcare delivery, but consumer experience and access as well, are likely to be more successful.  Creation Healthcare is also seeing an increase in consumer-based mHealth development projects and points out that "tools such as location-based services, touch-screen interfaces, voice controls, and HD video all have the potential to help you achieve your goals in new ways".  However, they also warn that an informed strategy development with a focus on the goals, rather than on the mode of delivery, is critical.

Facebook for Physicians

I came across an interesting posting by Tej Deol MD, a Canadian trained doctor and expatriate now living in Singapore.  He had recently attended a conference put on AdvaMed, a Washington-based lobbying group representing the medical device industry. In this posting, he comments on one of the conference sessions that covered the area of "social collaboration" in the medical community, and suggests that the push is driven by the powers that be really to facilitate the goal of usage data gathering.

That word "collaboration" seems to be popping its head up over and over again. It was just a couple of weeks ago, that Canada Health Infoway's CEO, Richard Alvarez used that term to describe what he felt was lacking in Canadian Healthcare to ensure EMR uptake and success.

It seems that in the US, there are a growing number of social networking companies who are specifically catering to the medical space. Companies like Sermo, WebMD, MedPage, MedConnect, Epocrates, Proximity, QuantiaMD and others. Sermo bills itself as "the largest online physician community in the US.... Sermo is a real-time meeting place where physicians get help with everything from patient care to practice management. They’ve described it as “therapeutic,” a “virtual water cooler” and “vital to my everyday practice.”


(Taken from Sermo slide presentation)

Most of us have trouble thinking of physicians as getting online to start conferring with colleagues during the day. But it makes sense. It's got to be coming to healthcare. It's starting to happen everywhere else.

Recently, while exploring an opportunity in the retagging and contextualization of medical research, I learned an important lesson about healthcare delivery - namely, that physicians, on the whole, are more likely to discuss patient cases and treatment with their colleagues than they are to start pouring through research. There's just too much of it, and the answers can't be gleaned from the abstracts alone. It's assumed that one would "hear" about the most important research anyway. Conferring with a fellow doctor, on the phone, over dinner or on the golf course is easier, dependable, and therefore safer ("conventional wisdom").

As we witness the shift from the paper-based medical practice to the EMR-based practice, and usher in the new generation of Facebook-literate, Blackberry-texting medical graduates, one can only assume that the conferring will continue amongst healthcare professionals, but most of it will be online. "Collaboration"will ultimately be at the kernel of the medical practice... Collaboration with colleagues, patients, medical suppliers, research publishers, and indeed with the entire patient healthcare delivery chain.  It's a good thing.  I think like all good things, it will take time to evolve into its most positive iteration.

I only hope that the new order of collaborative physicians maintain a higher standard for social etiquette than the rest of us do with our smartphones when collaborating.  If not, I pray that my own doctor doesn't receive that long-awaited text message in the midst of my next prostate exam.