MyDigitalHealth Network

Archive for the ‘Platform Info’ Category

The Challenges of mHealth

There is no doubt that mobile health (or mHealth) has been painfully slow to reach any meaningful adoption. In July 2014, McKinsey stated that mHealth is not a game changer.

Just yesterday, Anna McCollister-Slipp, a data analytics specialist and judge for the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize said unequivocally The digital health revolution has failed… so far.

I believe there are 2 fundamental reasons why mHealth has not seen widespread adoption: a) patient ignorance; and b) provider barriers.

Patient Ignorance: There are more than 100,000 healthcare apps in the App Store. Just finding one, even if the patient knew the right name, is challenging. Then they have to download it; register it; configure it; and if they need to sync with other wireless devices, they have to pair it. I must say that many of these wireless monitors are not very easy to pair.

The bottom line is it requires a lot of steps by consumers to adopt mHealth solutions. The Universal Truth in the world of consumer products is, each additional step that you make the user do, is one more step they won’t do. It has to be easy or consumers will lose interest quickly. Even if their health is involved.

Provider Barriers: Nobody on the provider side wants any other provider organization to win. If Mayo Clinic has developed a mobile app, Stanford Hospital won’t use it. Consequently, there are hundreds of apps that do essentially the same thing but are proprietary to each institution. Further, as we know, the EMR systems are not interoperable, so a patient using an app may not be able to access their own health records because their PCP and their Specialist physician are both in-network but associated with different hospitals.

And finally, often these applications are developed by a doctor or clinician that doesn’t know anything about developing consumer products. So they hire an App developer that knows nothing about healthcare. And the resulting application is neither intuitive nor easy to use.

We’ve thought a lot about these issues in creating a turnkey mobile platform for managing Heart Failure.

First off, CHF patients tend to be older, so you can’t require them to be tech savvy or perform a lot of steps. The solution has to be pre-configured.

Second, the interface has to be elegantly simple and intuitive – as readily simple as the iPad or iPhone were the first time you saw them. If the patient needs a lot of instruction on how to use the platform, they simply won’t do it.

Third, the solution needs to tie back to the clinical side. It’s not enough to register a dangerously high systolic pressure from an app. There has to be transmission of that data back to the medical staff (cardiologist or nurse practitioner) to alert them that their patient is at risk.

Fourth, the solution needs to integrate medication compliance as well as vital sign tracking and alerts. Half the battle is simply getting the patient to take the right meds at the right time. {This is something MyDigitalHealth Network does automatically without requiring any data uploads or configuration}

To further remove friction from the process, we provide both the tablet computer and the requisite wireless monitors to the patient for free. Our interest is to make managing their chronic disease so easy, all they have to do is use it.

The bottom line is that if we can’t change the outcome on readmission by giving patients something really easy to use at absolutely no cost, then mHealth will have a much longer road to adoption than I imagined. It should be interesting to see how it plays out.

#mydigitalhealth; #heartfailure; #congestiveheartfailure