How Healthcare Apps Will Revolutionize the Medical Industry

App developers have solved a lot of problems in the last five years. Transportation? Uber. Travel? AirBnB. Banking? The list is too long to even start.

One problem that the tech industry has been slow to tackle, however, is the healthcare industry. Fitness wearables are on the rise, and some on-demand house call services for doctors are finding market success. But when it comes to year-round care, most consumers are stuck with the same situation as fifty years ago: piles of paperwork, endless bureaucracy, and ultimately very little face time with a real physician.

Meanwhile, preventable illnesses related to lack of exercise or simply limited checkups cost the US economy billions of dollars — and thousands of lives — every year. It stands to reason that the market would be flooded with healthcare app developers. And yet, it isn’t.

Luckily, the outlook for the future is much brighter. Startups, iPhone app developers, and private research groups are beginning to push forward some ground-breaking new products and technologies that hint at a mobile-enabled future for American healthcare.

Take Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, for example, where clinical trials are underway that use mobile apps to do much more than simply communicate with patients.

For mental health patients, mobile software is actually engaging with mental health patients on an ongoing basis to administer cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. Automating this process doesn’t just save time for doctors — it creates a scenario where high-quality treatment is available to lower-income patients at a fraction of the cost.

The next obvious step is linking in fitness-tracking wearables to a holistic healthcare framework to make all the data available through wearables and iPhone apps useful to doctors. Unfortunately, breaking through to the entrenched and old-fashioned healthcare industry presents a serious challenge to Denver iPhone app developers.

Whether it’s an independent healthcare startup or integration with existing clinics that makes mobile-driven healthcare a reality, one thing is certain: the first wave of innovative companies to stake a claim in mobile healthcare are sure to see huge profits — all while making a positive difference