Every now and then, there comes a great fix for a broken system. For the healthcare system, mobile health or mHealth is the latest so called silver bullet. mHealth applications are health monitoring applications. The latest report by IMS titled Wireless Opportunities in Health and Wellness Monitoring -2012 Edition has some big forecasts. It says that the market of self-monitoring for disorders like high blood-pressure and high blood sugar levels is growing faster than the market for tele-medicine. The primary reason for this is that consumer-adoption rates are higher with mHealth than provider-adoption rates with tele-health. From a business perspective, mHealth avoids many problems that tele-health runs into – mainly the question of who pays for it. Consumers who download the app, pay for it.
As a consumer, what does all this mean for you? And where should you start? If you own a SmartPhone, check out Microsoft Vault. You need to make an account with Microsoft HealthVault like an email account, enter your health interests and MS-HealthVault recommends which app you need. Let’s say you need to keep track of your prescriptions. Microsoft Vault will recommend apps like Walgreens or CVS. Once you sync the app with your HealthVault account, managing prescriptions becomes simple. You can order refills, track the status of your order, receive reminders for prescriptions refills, and receive notifications when they are ready to be picked up.
Another set of empowering tools are peripherals like the blood-pressure monitors. Consumers can connect these to the SmartPhone to track the readings, see the trend in blood-pressure. However, the most value is derived when a consumer can, in real-time, upload the information and share it with his physician via a wireless connection. For most applications, the providers do not require any special adaptations to their IT systems.
For a consumer, these developments signify the coming of not just self-monitoring but also a new level of accountability.
