Developing agility
As many of you may have guessed, I love and am fascinated by technology, specifically the way that technology can be used in healthcare. One of the places that is the biggest growth opportunity in mobile health, or mHealth. There are so many possibilities, however, in North America and assume much of the developed world there are so many barriers to implementation.
One of the problems with such a robust system is the intolerance and aversion to risk. Reading articles like the one clipped below both excites me and makes me disappointed. Excited seeing the real differences that can and are being made using these technologies, disappointing that it is often in other nations. I often wonder what will it take to get Canada to start to push more aggressively forward in these new areas. To explore mHealth and informatics as rigorously and vigorously as heart transplantation. If we don’t, the opportunities will remain in minds of dreamers like myself, which often right beside those that could use it but light years away from being a reality.
Time to get mHealth moving
Using mobile devices to collect and share health data can make healthcare cheaper, faster and more equitable, argues Jody Ranck.
Countless lives are lost each year because of limited access to health information. If an infectious disease breaks out in a remote village, for example, it can take weeks for surveillance data collected on paper to reach central systems — and in that time, the outbreak could have become an epidemic.
Using mobile phones in this way, known as mHealth, can dramatically reduce the damage caused by disease. It can also prevent drug stock-outs and improve patient care.
Developments in modern ICT — moving beyond the computer, fax and landlines to mobile devices — are key to improving the ease and efficiency of health data flows, ultimately giving people greater and more equitable access to health services.
