Though mobile apps are often accused of being an addictive distraction, there is no denial that mobile apps are immensely popular, useful and interesting. With cutting edge technology making apps even better, mobile has grown to become healthcare assistant. Earlier, apps were confined to lifestyle habits and fitness tracking (diet, calories management and general health). But over the last few years, new possibilities have entered the healthcare service domain.
In this blog you will learn how healthcare service-based mobile apps are getting prevalent and transforming the way you manage your personal health. Let’s dig deep:
Healthcare Scenario
Healthcare has grown into a big pool with many segments that revolutionary mobile apps are trying to touch.From diagnosis to medication and even after discharge, mobile apps accompany both patients and doctors alike.
Patients can interact with healthcare service-based apps for numerous purposes such as:
- Tracking prescribed drug refills
- Drug dosage reminders
- Symptoms checking
- Virtual consultations
- Self- education patient care
- Live chat with Doctors
- Recovery monitoring
- Professional Medical advice
- Post-discharge care
- Insurance claims management
Not just for patients, there are great medical apps that are also targeted at physicians and doctors to empower their practices.
Healthcare app development companies continue to develop user-friendly hospitals-oriented medical apps that are focused on:
- Patient on-boarding process
- Staff and supply management
- Surgery planner
- Appointment scheduler
- Reports management
- Live conversations
- AR-enabled diagnosis
- Media sharing
- Insurance claims management
- Post-discharge formalities
Digital Healthcare: Facts & Figures
With rise and rise of mobile app technology, the pace at which healthcare industry is adapting digital advancements is becoming more rapid.
Pulse of Online Health 2015 report discovers that as much as 66% of Americans leverage mobile apps to manage their health issue.
The same revelation also says that 79% of them would prefer a wearable device to monitor their health and fitness.
According to Research2Guidance Annual mHealth Report 2016, nearly 100K healthcare apps have been published since 2015 to the leading app stores that were already brimming with 259,000 medical apps.
Resurgent surge of mHealth apps:
Like mCommerce apps, digital healthcare choices have also taken the shape of mHealth apps. The growing prevalence of healthcare service based apps aim at introducing human touch through the means of innovative technology.
Today’s mHealth apps are focused on:
- Enabling interaction between doctors and patients
- Maintaining a smooth flow of medical practices
- Providing hassle-free virtual healthcare solution
- Bridging the gap between users and service providers
As the market grows thick with technology sound users, mHealth apps allow patients to engage with healthcare providers, building a bridge in the system.
Using the AR (Augmented Reality) in mobile apps, doctors can easily examine and explain complicated surgical processes to their patients and fellow practitioners.
Advantages of healthcare service-based apps
1. Well-Managed Historical Records
Computers might have made the job easier for hospitals/doctors. Still, to keep the records of patient in nice order is a challenging and demanding task. It consumes a lot of time.
Moreover, fetching the record file in a short notice involves speed and efficiency. This is where a dedicated medical record management app helps.
Such special healthcare service-based mobile app accelerates the job of tracking and extracting the patients’ records for reputed hospitals.
2. Cost & Time Saving
Direct interactions between doctors and patients mean the tedious process that contains:
- Heavy formalities
- Appointment booking
- Database management
- Consultation and associated charges
- Frequent Personal visits and transportation
- Patient on-boarding
- Expensive diagnosis &
- Post-diagnosis instructions.
Such situations increase expenses and waste time for both hospitals and patients.
mHealth apps help streamline the process and save both time and money.
3. Seamless Communication
We are by now completely used to communication apps like Facetime, Viber, Skype and Snapchat to connect with people across the world.
We can arguably say that we are not too far from using futuristic healthcare service-based apps that would enable patients to talk to doctors practically from anywhere in the world.
Patients could share the screenshots or video of lesions or cuts or other physical symptoms of their body to diagnose the ailments. This can eliminate the need to wait for appointments and consultations.
In future, there will be apps for Android and iOS with paid mechanism that would allow patients to get their health-related queries resolved by a network of licensed doctors.
4. Safe Medical Treatments & Recommendations
Smartphones will have apps that would help capture metrics related to patient’s health. This numbers will show the progress patient has made after starting the recommended treatment.
However, such apps require precise quality of diagnosis and unerring medications. Information passed on to the patient via these apps must deliver the results expected by them at comfortable charges.
5. Improved Emergency Management
In this contemporary time, healthcare app development companies have much more potential than can be conceived. They continue to surprise patients with apps that enable them to track their health, fitness, sugar and cholesterol levels, remind them of pills and water, and even control your sleep.
Some of these are quite essential in avoiding situations of sudden massive risk since users constantly keep themselves updated on their health status. For instance, it is easy for a heart patient to educate himself about his medical situation and avoid life-threatening emergencies.
Examples of Real-time healthcare mobile apps
Some of the apps that are transforming healthcare service industry are:
- For health monitoring: Eve, AsthmaMD, SugarSense
- For pharmaceutical aid: Digital Pharmacist
- For body examination: Insight Optics
- For interactions with Doctors/Therapists: Talkspace, Medici
- Drug advice/insight: WebMD, Medscape, Epocrates
Endless Possibilities
What these apps can do seems like the inception of something bigger and better. Healthcare service-based mobile apps are going to surpass present standard and bring more innovations to make doctor-patient engagement more viable.
Looking at how healthcare mobile apps help doctors perform their operations well and enable patients to get exact medical information, we can say mobile healthcare domain is set for tremendous transformation.
Conclusion:
Presumably, the healthcare sector is poised for innovative mobile apps for medical treatments and communications. With these apps, patients would limit their medical visits to hospitals and gain preventive care from the comfort of their home on their own devices. Thus, present scenario of growing prevalence of healthcare service-based mobile apps promises an interesting future.