In addition to telehealth and remote monitoring systems, the Mobile Health Industry has had a significant impact on lowering ER (emergency room) visits and hospitalization throughout the spectrum of healthcare by improving care and communication coordination among doctors, nurses, specialists, and others. Studies have indicated that the rates for hospital readmission have decreased by 92%, while ER visits have also reduced by 87% due to greater communication and healthcare apps.
The digital era is finally catching up to the latest health care. As a result, mobile applications for the healthcare professionals working in medical practices, hospitals, physician-owned multi-specialty providers, and elder-care facilities have become more normalized than ever.
The mobile medical apps are desk-free and provide instant and much easier communication between doctors and patients. They also offer immediate data or information retrieval. Regarding economics, the health care application industry had an estimated worth of around $28 billion in 2018 and is expected to increase to over $100 billion by 2023.
Mobile applications hold value for both patients and health care providers since they offer a secure way to retrieve PHI (patient health information) from both medical practices or medical settings and patients’ homes. However, at this stage, any health care app in the United States has to be HIPAA compliant, meaning that the commercial consumer application does not match the set-out safety standards.
Here are a few of the top advantages of the latest health care apps:
#1 Health Care Apps Offer Simple And Secure Mobile Clinical Communications
A unified communication solution is regarded as a standard regarding the collaboration platforms for patients and health care providers. Healthcare security is extremely important, and a home health care application assists with providing a very secure and reliable solution since these apps offer directs lines of confidential and secure communication between the provider and the patient. They also offer simplicity by joining single-purpose applications under one interface. This assists with promoting staff efficiency.
#2 Health Care Apps Improve Physician/Patient Engagement
In most cases, doctors are typically extremely busy individuals, moving from one patient or emergency to the next. A tool such as a mobile health care app can improve and enhance patient engagement and communications since they can be used on the go. In addition to this, hospitals must track the outcomes of patients to match Affordable Care Act compliance, which has become important again. With this in mind, the latest generation of home health care apps has recently launched that offer patient feedback, performance metrics, and a way to zero in on the gaps that occur in workflow. This provides a way for nursing supervisors or doctors to stay on track with metrics and patient information directly on their smartphones during their lunch break or even once they have left work to go home for the evening.
#3 Health Care Apps Offer Mobile Telemedicine Video Chat Abilities
Mobile chat and telemedicine capabilities have increased immensely during the era of Covid-19. In the future, mobile healthcare apps are set to start playing a much greater and more important role in telemedicine. For example, with a mobile app, a doctor-on-call for “telemedicine work” can initiate a conference with a patient on either their tablet, laptop, or smartphone, rather than the traditional method of sitting behind a desk, with access to a PC. The overall quality relating to these digital communication telemedicine tools will continue to improve when 5G is introduced along with much faster, more reliable, and more efficient internet speeds.
#4 Health Care Apps Provide Improved Patient Scheduling
Hospitals, in general, are chaotic environments with physicians, specialists, and nurses working on all types of erratic shifts, which can make patient scheduling a challenging and complex task. However, with the development of the latest apps, healthcare professionals and nurses can now post the schedule for their shifts a month or a few weeks in advance. These new applications use special algorithms that pick up the nurse or doctor’s most frequent of common shifts while also directly sending information to a staff manager if a change in a shift occurs.
#5 Health Care Apps Provide Better Health Information Systems
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are improving with each generation introduced. Also, with secure geofencing, MDM, and Wi-Fi now established, significantly improved HIS (Health Information Systems) has become inevitable. Healthcare workers and providers can now easily and better access EHRs via a mobile healthcare app that maintains extremely secure links to a back-end cloud system.
Benefits Of Mental Health Apps
The mental health applications provide several valuable advantages that traditional healthcare practices fail to achieve. These include:
– Portability And Convenience
They are easy to transport, allowing immediate assistance through a device or a phone.
– Serve Populations That Normally Would Not Be Able To Receive Treatment
People in low-income or rural areas can receive immense benefits that aren’t available in a traditional format due to financial or geographic constraints.
– Reluctant Patients Can Be Reached And Helped
These apps offer anonymity for a reluctant person to visit an in-person practice or mental healthcare facility. This includes individuals with a phobia or a person that cannot leave their home.
– Assistance Outside Of Sessions
Health care applications can promote interactive activities from home that the patient can complete and then send to their therapist.
– Reminders
Apps can send a reminder to a patient to complete an assignment or task or take their medication.
– Preventative Treatment
Mental health apps can also provide preventative treatment via education and early intervention. These apps also provide a safer place for a person to complete a self-assessment and any applicable resources to find the right treatment.
As healthcare apps continue to mature, they have started to provide much more secure, cohesive, and efficient patient care in the way of providing data instantly (in real-time), on a nurse’s or doctor’s smartphone or any other type of mobile device.