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.

Amplify’d from www.scidev.net

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.

You can’t see health data as they flow from clinic to decision-maker — but they are absolutely critical for informing good policies and allocating resources appropriately.

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.

But equipped with a mobile phone, a health worker in a remote area can send real-time data on symptoms observed in an outbreak to the health ministry. 

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.

The mobile solution
Read more at www.scidev.net
 
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mHealth is the future

I’ve really taken a bit interest to mobile apps, as a clinician and as a patient interested in my own health. From measuring runs during my undergraduate to tracking the slow accumulation of particular matter around my waist and drying to shed said matter.

From clinical tools at the bedside to importing nutritional records from a mobile app into a health record, mobile health is going to have huge impacts on healthcare in the future. If I have an app that can approximate the quality of sleep I’m getting, why can’t my patients? If there is a range of a couple hours to administer certain medications, why not wait until they are coming out of a deep sleep cycle?

Thinking about silly apps like Bump, an application that lets you transfer information by bumping two iphone holding fists together, what will the future of patient admission be? Any chance they will be able to use their own mobile phone to send the data to the admitting nurse? So many neat possibilities, only time will tell.

Amplify’d from gigaom.com

Mobile Health Apps Are on the Rise

The health care sector is in the early stages of a potentially disruptive era, with technological change in the industry being driven by the growth of smartphones and the number of connected devices readily available. More and more, apps are assuming a larger role in the system. There are currently over

6,000 health- and medicine-related apps in the Apple App Store, and, as we discuss in a new report at GigaOM Pro, mobile health is creating new
possibilities for clinicians and patients to manage their care and track important health information.

Though still a somewhat loosely defined term, The World Health Organization calls mHealth “an area of electronic health (eHealth)” that is “

the provision of health services and information via mobile technologies such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).” Mobile Health Initiative (mHI) founder Peter Waegemann, in speaking at the mHI event in Washington, D.C. this year, said that mHealth “focuses on behavioral and structural changes.” Whereas eHealth is focused on technology to drive the change, “the vision for mHealth includes collecting data through text, images, emails and supporting patient-hood. As more and more connected devices come to market, we expect the definition of mHealth to broaden in scope.

Read more at gigaom.com
 
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