mHealth Helps Improve the Quality of Healthcare by Delivering More Accurate and Timely Patient Information
The first post in this series detailed how mHealth can increase access to wellness tools and services by bringing healthcare closer (physically) to people. This post details how mHealth can improve the accuracy of healthcare data as well as the speed of access to this information.
Each year, the cost of medical errors run in the billions of dollars and this can be explained in numerous ways such as misdiagnosis, carelessness, inaccurate info, etc., but there’s another form of error that isn’t so obvious, basic human error. Common mistakes can include the misreading of a fax printout or illegible handwriting and can result in inputting wrong information.
You’ve experienced this before -- ever try reading a doctor’s prescription or decipher a fax when the toner is low? Well this is what the healthcare industry faces every day.
- Now take into account chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease which make up a high percentage of today’s healthcare expenditures. Many of these diseases are managed by taking periodic biometric measurements usually during doctor visits. This model of per-visit patient care poses a few problems (and opportunities) that can be addressed with the use of mHealth. In this article, the following two challenges are discussed. Patients, and their healthcare providers, need to take (and record) regular biometric measurements i.e. blood glucose levels, cholesterol, etc. Most often, this occurs only during doctor visits, which may be infrequent or perhaps every few weeks, depending on the specialist.
- Biometric information is most often handwritten or manually recorded in a patients’ medical record.
In the first case, patients can wait long periods of time between doctor visits. Through mHealth, biometric information can be captured, sent remotely and in real-time via a patient’s digital medical device (or mobile device) through their wireless network. This information can then be used by their healthcare provider to better monitor and treat the patient’s chronic condition. The benefit of this is that patients don’t have to wait until their next doctor visit to track their progress – it can be done in real-time between visits.
In the second case, biometric information is most often handwritten or manually processed. Through mHealth, this information would be captured and shared digitally resulting in data that’s more accurate and would have digital value that can be leveraged more effectively across other health and wellness technologies.
The use cases for mHealth can go on and on and this article looked at two very common scenarios where mHealth can address these issues and deliver more accurate and timely patient information that can ultimately lead to better quality of care for the patient.
