Mobile application has recently been a profitable business area for a number of software groups and companies in the last 5 years. Simultaneously, mobile development companies has recently witnessed a movement with an upsurge of healthcare apps. This is partly generated from the ever-increasing consciousness of human beings in general and mobile users in particular.
Table of Contents
Apps for the public and professionals
Thousands of healthcare applications have been built for both public and healthcare professionals. As for patients and public, health apps play the roles of a health assistant with calories counting, food intake control, alerts on heart attack failure… Apps for professionals serve to track, monitor and share complicated health information or drug interactions, medical calculator. Even via mobile apps, patients and doctors can look at X-rays, CT scans and MRIs together or book appointments directly without waiting for GP.
The birth and spread of health care apps brings a vast number of benefits. First and foremost, mobile apps provide patients credible personal tools to handle their own health and related activities. Via mobile apps, patients can easily access to health care service such as appointment arrangement, at-home service. Moreover, the use of mobile apps enhances patients’ engagement with reminder function, for example.
The application of mobile apps as healthcare products
Apps for medical training and professional development
Especially, mobile apps can be utilized to support medical training and professional development with ubiquity, easy access and convenient updating process. Thanks to the technology which already exists, applications for cell phones can be established without developing a bespoke operating system or manufacture new hardware, giving conditions to faster and cheaper development and innovation. The innovation creates interactive learning with sound, video, voice recorder, 3G and so on.
Six health-concerned areas reported to be improved significantly by mobile apps are long-term disease management, primary diagnosis, emergency response systems, health and wellness information, mobile-enhanced RFID-based tracking of drugs and public health research. In 2013, mobile apps focusing on health care are predicted to be a new trend in the circle of mobile applications.
Mobile app plays an important role in the future of healthcare services. We should believe that, healthcare tech give us more advantages than disadvantages.