MHealth is a short term for “mobile health”. This refers to taking a patient’s vital signs, conducting remote exams, and then delivering the collected information for the doctor’s evaluation, all through the use of mobile phones, tablets, and other common portable gadgets. You could say this is the next level from the previously known eHealth, which simply allows for teleconsult, patient record keeping and other crucial patient reminders.
With people’s increasing dependence on the internet, the technology of mHealth was identified as a rapidly growing need in the healthcare industry in recent years and is projected to keep on exponentially increasing in popularity in the years to come. So, if you or your company is in the field of healthcare, having mHealth as one of your offerings is a must to keep relevant. Furthermore, if your company is in the field of education for medical doctors, you must know that mHealth is also gaining importance as a tool for allowing students to have exposure to health issues from remote areas.
If your company is on the journey of designing your own mHealth application or tool, a reliable software testing company is a great ally to have. Employing the services of a professional supplier for software testing will help ensure that your application will run smoothly once you make it available to the public and let you get the results your company is aiming for.
To help give you insights in coming up with the perfect mHealth tool for your company, here are some great things to know:
Types of MHealth Applications
Remote monitoring: this type allows for medical practitioners to get accurate and real-time pertinent data about a patient’s health status without requiring them to visit the clinic or doing home visits. Some examples of reports it could deliver are blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate, and oxygen levels, among others.
Productivity applications: this mHealth type aims to help healthcare workers tackle their tasks more efficiently. This type of application could accomplish remote dictation, patient charting, internal or within the medical unit communication, and patient home visit scheduling.
Diagnostic and clinical applications: this type allows doctors to do remote imaging, check laboratory results and other patient records in order to come up with faster but accurate diagnoses, especially for patients in remote areas. Correlatively, this type of application can also allow for patients to request appointment schedules.
Clinical reference applications: this type, similar to the productivity applications, aims to make medical practitioners’ lives easier. Instead of doctors having to look up information online, which may even have conflicting data sometimes, or lugging around physical reference materials, they can now turn to a streamlined and easy-to-use application. Some examples of the documents contained in application are: ICD-10, ICD-9 and E&M Coding.
Healthy living applications: If there are applications developed with the goal of assisting doctors, there are also those on the other end of the spectrum designed to help patients, or just about anybody, monitor and achieve overall good health. Some of the things that this type of mHealth can do are: sleep monitoring, diet tracking, heart rate readings and exercise logging. Aside from simply maintaining wellness, this type of application could be life-savers for patients suffering from diabetes, heart diseases or other chronic and serious conditions.
Fitbit: this is an application that comes in the form of a trendy wristwatch. The application became such a hit because it allows its users to have an overall health and wellness monitor in such a sleek and non-obstructive way.
The Fitbit can monitor the following:
- Day-to-day physical activities such as the number of steps the wearer take, distance gone and the calories burned on the go
- Sleep cycles, quality and length
- Menstrual cycle
- Heart rate and variability
- Oxygen saturation reading
- Skin temperature
- Breathing rate
Aside from the health status data it can track, the Fitbit has gained even more popularity as an overall health companion because it comes with smart extras such as on-screen workouts and meditation guides, all while allowing for music streaming.
Apple Heart Study: Banking on the accurate and continuous heart rate monitoring from a person’s Apple watch, this application was even employed by Stanford Medicine in studying irregular heart rates. This mHealth application is being considered as an early detection tool for conditions such as atrial fibrillation, one of the possible causes of stroke.
MyChart: this application is one of the most popular mHealth tools for Android users. MyChart could especially be useful for patients with ongoing or long-term conditions that would require close or continuous monitoring. It can help patients by allowing them to see in one glance their laboratory results, medication, and immunization, among others.
What mHeath application have you identified a need for that you think isn’t out in the market just yet? Perhaps your company could be the first in bringing it to fruition. Good luck!
