Theoretical Situation Analysis

The use of mobile technology in the healthcare industry has exploded in the last ten years. Mobile health or mHealth, provides an entire new aspect of the relationship between patients and their doctors and other medical providers. Mobile devices place important and critical information into a medical professional’s hands in real-time. Doctors can monitor a patient’s condition more frequently, allowing them to make better and more informed decisions and diagnoses.

Mhealth has reached the poorest of communities (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.). More than 9 million patients email their physician in 2009 (Digital Health Care, 2010), because patients’ busy lifestyles do not allow time for an office visit for non-emergent health conditions. . In recent years, the expansion of mobile health (mhealth) technologies, including health text messaging, mobile phone applications, remote monitoring, and portable sensors, have changed the way health care is being delivered in the U.S. and globally (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.). Patients like the convenience of communicating with his or her physician through advanced technology.

The Better Health Association is always looking for stronger ways to connect with individuals within our community. As technology has increased, individuals spend large amounts of time online or on their cell phones. Our goal is to develop an app which will allow a Better Health patient to access any time of the day 24-7. Benefits of the app will include tips on health education, which in return will allow the patient the opportunity to take preventive steps in taking care of themselves. I will deepen the leadership and management practice in order to strengthen the organization to fulfill our goals.

As consumers utilize smartphones, tablets, and other devices for other functions like social media and email, they are starting to look at these features to assist them with their healthcare. Mobile body area network devices will be a growing trend in the coming years as a way to get patients engaged in their healthcare and also to give providers routine updates on the status of patients with chronic conditions. As DeGaspari (2014) indicates, these devices can lead to improved functionality for other devices used in hospitals, such as sensors for monitoring patients that might get up and wander or be a fall risk. Telemedicine will continue to grow as payers, providers, and patients all start to realize the mutual benefits that can be

Unfortunately, along with the good must come the bad. For every positive aspect of smartphones and social media in healthcare related settings, there is an equally negative aspect. One pitfall of smartphones in healthcare is directly related to one of the positive aspects of smartphones: the availability of medical

This feature links patient portals and EHRs to consumer health information (Medline Plus, 2015). For example, MedlinePlus Connect is a free service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that offers an added benefit to the provider-patient relationship as an authoritative up-to-date health information resource for providers, their patients, and their families (Medline Plus, 2015). Implementing MedlinePlus is a one-time effort, doesn’t require registration, and can be configured to link to more than one source of consumer health information (Medline Plus, 2015). Medline Plus links both health care, drug, and lab data results through medication codes, and an EMR/EHR system that has the capacity to use Medline Plus is a great asset in helping the practice achieve one of the criteria’s for meaningful

Healthcare is evolving, and the uses of technological innovations are reshaping the delivery of healthcare services. Adoption of mobile applications for electronic health (e-health) can assist patients and providers monitor or track lifestyles activities that may indicate a change in health behavior or provide approaches to address future health challenges. As new technologies emerge, it is vital that healthcare professional scrutinize these innovations to extract useful resources that can help address challenges such as high hospital readmission for dual eligible patients. A proposal to help Trinity Health System decrease its readmission rate is to implement a hands-on e-health literacy model program for dual eligible patients and their caregivers

This innovative app was actually designed by a research team led by students from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. They are part of a group called Memento, which is a student-run organization at their school. These ambitious students come from a variety of fields of study, with expertise in medicine, basic sciences, and engineering. They collaborated together to pool their talents and design this very helpful online app.

SMART platform project was then created to achieve the goals of 1) Develop a user interface which allows “iPhone-like” substitutability for medical apps based upon shared basic components; and 2) Create a set of services that enables efficient data capture, storage, retrieval and analytics, which are scalable to the national level and respectful of institutional autonomy and patient privacy. Mandel et al. (2016) described SMART as an interoperability project with the distinctive goal of developing a platform to enable medical applications to be written once and run unmodified across different healthcare IT systems.

Mobile devices have allowed health care professionals to have information at their fingertips. Informational resources such as treatment guidelines, drug references, and medical literature are a few

An electronic health record (EHR) is a digital version of a patient’s paper chart. Through EHRs information can be available instantly and securely to authorized users. Electronic Health Record contain the medical and treatment histories of patients, patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory and test results, it allows access to evidence-based tools that providers can use to make decisions about a patient’s care and automate and streamline provider workflow. The main purpose of EHRs are to share information with other health care providers and organizations such as laboratories,

Lastly, there are currently “over 15,000” apps readily available for patient use that promote health and wellness (Montgomery, 2014, para 1). The concern exists is that there are no indicators of which apps are reliable and which are not. “In September 2013, the FDA released a statement on the guidance of regulations for mHealth apps. The FDA concluded that the majority of medical apps do not pose a significant health risk to consumers and do not require oversight” (Dicianno, et al., 2015, p. 402). When a patient has health concerns or questions and turns to an app to look up symptoms that they or a loved one is having, they rely on what they read. If the patient has been vomiting and appears to be lethargic, it may indicate a viral infection and that within a few days, if not any better seek medical attention. Unbeknown to the app obviously, the patient had fallen earlier in the day and hit their head, which with these symptoms; they should seek immediate medical treatment. Being a user of the WebMD app, when a symptom has been selected such as chest pain, it provides questions to refine the symptoms and if the user selects pain when taking a deep breath, an alert will pop up instructing them to seek emergency medical attention.

The app includes personalization and notifications which increases the patient’s engagement with his or her doctors and hospitals. Activity feed shows summaries of the patient’s activities, enabling a new level of learning.

The Apple Health app gives you an easy-to-read dashboard of your health and fitness data. In addition, with HealthKit, users can make all the unbelievable health and fitness apps on your device work together, and work harder, for the user. Thus app contains a plethora of information such as body measurements and vitals which can be saved to a day, weekly, monthly, and yearly report. The graphic user interface (GUI) is

While software selection criteria were not in scope for this effort, it does warrant discussion on the overall availability of specialty software for the medical industry on iOS, Android and Windows platforms. Currently, most of the “MCA’s” or Medical Clinical Assistant platforms operate in a Windows-only environment, as do most of the key medical records and billing platforms in the medical field. The cost of custom software development to build a mobile solution is far beyond the budget of most local hospitals and not an endeavor to be undertaken lightly.