mHealth Apps Help Doctors and Patients With Decisions

mHealth app development never ceases to amaze us. Just recently, Dogtown Media News covered how iCow is tackling the nutrition epidemic in Africa and a few apps that can make your mind healthier. Now, new MedTech apps are helping doctors and patients optimize their decisions.

Multiple Players in the mHealth Market

Over centuries of medical research, we’ve compiled vast amounts of data to aid doctors in treating their patients efficiently. But the mountain of data is overwhelming; no human could possibly sift through all of the information available for each malady when making a decision about the patient’s treatment plan.

A group of apps is solving this problem by streamlining evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine focuses on applying data from research to improve decision-making. A number of companies are helping doctors and patients make health decisions more confidently with their mHealth reference apps. DynaMed Mobile, Isabel, Figure 1, Pepid, QxMD, Medscape, Doximity, and the San Francisco-based developers of athenahealth’s Epocrates name just a few.

Establishing Trust With Technology

Recently, chief medical information officer and practicing internist Manish Naik, MD, had a patient hesitant of receiving vaccines due to an egg allergy. These vaccines were needed because the patient was more susceptible to the flu or pneumonia because of a medical condition. After reviewing the relevant data with UpToDate, a reference app from Wolters Kluwer, the patient agreed to receive both the flu and pneumonia vaccine.

Quick and efficient access to the data allowed Doctor Naik and the patient to make a better judgment call in what would normally be a difficult hurdle to overcome. UpToDate, the app Naik used, receives more than 1 million visitors a day. It draws upon the knowledge of 6,000 doctors around the world. About 30 percent of the visitors revise their diagnosis after taking the presented information into account.

Integrating With Other Paradigms

Naik has used the app to help guide many patients through their decision-making process. By being available on multiple devices and connected to electronic health records (EHR), reference apps are becoming increasingly convenient to access for doctors. “The flexibility of using it on multiple devices allows me to access information on the go,” Naik says. “It is integrated into our EHR workflow. Healthcare providers can access it directly from the electronic health record.”

This integration with modern medical tech paradigms has allowed many doctors to be more cost-effective than ever. Before, it was common for Naik to have to get back in touch with a patient after hours of laborious research. This has been dwindled down to minutes now.

Years ago, people would have laughed at you if you told them about all of the possible benefits that mHealth app developers could bring to the world. Yet, fast-forward just a little bit, and here they are. It’s amazing to think about all that mHealth has achieved in various aspects of medicine, all in such a short amount of time. We can’t wait to see what 2018 brings to the table for MedTech apps.