Mobile technologies make many aspects of our lives easier – that is its main purpose. Healthcare is not an exception, and year after year more hospital begin to adopt technologies to become more advanced and effective.
The mHealth Trend
The term mHealth appeared not so long ago, but it has already grown into an impressive global industry of medical mobile app development: in 2016 App Store offered over 250.000 applications connected with health and wellness.
Grand View Research expects a mind-blowing 44.2% compound annual growth for the market of medical applications. The forecast also shows that it may reach $111.8B by 2025.
The main trend is a precision-based model when it comes to mobile healthcare. This basically means personalization of treatment: each customer receives individual treatment delivery based on dozens of different factors like age, sex, health state, symptoms, etc.
Possibilities and Benefits of mHealth
Imagine you go to a lab and have your blood tested. After that, you receive an email, and then you need to send it to your doctor. Downloading lab results or maybe printing is inconvenient. Using an app, on the other hand, is faster and easier.
The most valuable benefit of a medical app is undoubtedly seamless exchange of the information. Lab results are shared with a doctor in no time and appear in hospital records.
Changing the treatment plan without seeing a patient in person becomes possible. Demo videos and instructions enable people to control their health.
Telemedicine is a rising trend as few people attend their doctors personally due to the lack of time. Moreover, those who live in remote areas, are even less likely to visit a doctor.
Video connection can allow doctors give consultations and immediately make plans for the further treatment.
So, the main benefit is effective and fast communication. Those unnecessary intermediate steps between giving and receiving the data can be avoided if the hospital cares to create a good mobile app that will be beneficial both for staff and patients.
This solution can also be useful in emergency situations – geolocation and maps will help to locate the nearest hospital: the app will send location data immediately, and this will save time for the ambulance team to get directions.
So, mHealth apps are useful on every step of doctor-patient interaction.
Medical App Classification
For some people, the market of mHealth can seem overwhelming. It’s no surprise, as there are lots of apps, and it can sometimes be hard to understand their purposes and possibilities. That’s why here we’ll give you a clearer understanding of the classification of mHealth apps so that you can choose which ones will be the best for your hospital.
- Chronic care management apps – manage different diseases like diabetes, cancer, and mental illnesses. Such apps are often connected with wearables, which enables them to control blood pressure, heart rate and other important indicators of health state.
- Medical apps – provide guidance and spreading awareness. They also can help people to diagnose themselves, and this is a rather popular practice. According to Statista, in 2017 almost 20% of adults in the US use them for self-diagnosis, while 46% can imagine themselves doing so.
- Healthcare and fitness apps – usually work as personal trainers and dietitians. They include workout plans, video tutorials, help to count calories and water intake, and motivate users to stay active and lead a healthy lifestyle. Such apps make up the most numerous category of all healthcare applications as it’s fairly easy to develop them. Fitness apps are often connected to wearables such as smartwatches and fitness wristbands.
- Women’s health apps – cover all aspects of women’s health, including period trackers and breast cancer checkers. Also, these apps cover all aspects of childbirth, from conceiving and pregnancy to breastfeeding and postpartum childcare.
- Medication management apps – help to track and manage medicine intake, using reminders in notifications. It is especially useful if a patient needs to many different medications – the app will tell when to take them and the reminders will provide regularity.
- Personal health record apps – allow storing all the information about allergies, medical conditions, blood type, recent operations etc.
- Patient education apps – contain text materials and video tutorials that help patients manage their health.
These are the main types of mobile medical applications for patients. Often these types are combined. The reason is that the more functions the app has, the more it is appreciated by users that enjoy having all in one place: probably, a very small percentage of people will install lots of apps on their phones.
Most Important Features
Accenture’s report tells about top three features in a healthcare app that patients want. However, only 11% of all mHealth apps can offer them to users. This results in low user engagement and retention rate, so if providers want to gain their audience, including these features will definitely help.
Here is a hospital mobile apps features list.
Access to EHR/EMR
Access to electronic medical and health records is a №1 desired feature. Security requirements and restrictions are the reason why so few apps have it. However, this feature allows sending lab test results and documents, which connects departments and patients faster.
Appointments
With this feature, the patient is able to schedule, postpone or cancel appointments with doctors right in their mobile app without a need to call the doctor. It’s very convenient and fast, and all the information immediately synchronizes with the doctor’s schedule.
Prescription refills
Connection to the pharmacy is one of the most important features of hospital app that allows getting refills automatically without a need to call or email the pharmacy. A doctor just sends a request, and a patient is able to take the order once it’s ready.
Video calls and chats
Connection to the doctor is very important, however, often people don’t have time to see their doctor in person. According to Statista, telemedicine is one of the most attractive areas of mHealth.
Wayfinding and search
For this feature, location-based services are used. Patients need to be able to get routes to the hospital and find departments, wings, and building within hospitals.
Notifications on appointments and medication
Notifications are one of the best tools available in a mobile app. Medical apps use notifications to remind patients about their appointments with doctors and pills intakes.
List of doctors
It’s a great thing if a medical app shows a list of doctors according to location. This list should also contain doctors’ qualifications, experience, publications, and specialty.
Emergency calls
A one-click option, that will immediately call a doctor or a hospital is very important for those patients who get their treatment at home. In case of emergency, a one-click button is a fast way to call for help.
Payment
Paying hospital bills through a mobile app is faster and easier, so an integration of a payment gateway is a great way to have everything in one place and thus improve the user experience.
These are the best features of the medical app, that will allow it to compete with other medical apps. Apart from that, a mHealth app has to be very simple. As it contains many functions, a patient has to navigate easily.
Thanks for the great article Hassan.
If anybody is interested in a good Medication Management App I would recommend you can check out the MedManage app. It’s a medication list and calendar that reminds you to take your medications and tracks your adherence progress, especially useful for people taking multiple medicines and their caregivers.