The rise in mHealth- How mHealth is redefining healthcare

How mHealth is redefining healthcare

Mobile devices have revamped the human lives exponentially, practically inventing processes across every industry- from education to retail, manufacturing to finance. In today’s day and age when healthcare is a key priority that the world has its eyes set on, technology has helped in every possible way- from helping manage chronic diseases to fighting a pandemic. mHealth or mobile health has been redefining healthcare since the past decade and in this article, we will discuss the several ways healthcare has been redefined with the help of mHealth.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is mHealth?

mHealth and mobile health is healthcare and medicine practice using mobile devices. These mobile devices can be mobile phones, tablets, laptops, custom-made healthcare devices and personal digital assistants powered with mobile technology. Mhealth is considered to be a subsegment of the larger e-health industry and was first used by Robert Istepanian as the use of ‘emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare’. 

mHealth democratizes access to healthcare tracking and reduces physician dependency for health monitoring and patient data collection. Mhealth also steps in educating patients about preventive healthcare, upholds treatments and disease surveillance which in-turn reduces the burden on the healthcare systems.

Image source mHealth is incremental in reformulating healthcare and especially in the trying times like a pandemic, physicians and healthcare resort to mHealth to ensure the timely treatment to patients undergoing critical as well as non-critical conditions.

Here’s how mHealth redefines healthcare:

Patient vital tracking

Mhealth enables patients to keep a track of their daily progress, medications, activities and vitals such as heart rate via intuitive apps. This not only involves the patients into the process of healthcare but also ensures that the patient data is closely monitored for a long period and the data is readily available for the physician on the visit. For chronic conditions, regular patient monitoring can help in raising alarms for emergencies before they take place and also makes the patient more accountable for treatment, medication and activity adherence. 

Streamlined data access

Image Source In most of the developing countries across the globe, the patient data is not centralized and cannot be readily accessed over the cloud. Mhealth breaks this barrier by maintaining patient treatment, history and vital data right in an app that can be used by the healthcare providers whenever needed and also in case of emergency. The physicians and healthcare providers also make use of tablets for healthcare with apps to take notes, offer prescriptions and offer consultation over the phone with highly accurate data.

Enabling...