During the last few years, mobile devices are penetrating consumers’ lives. To ensure a consumer-centric approach, businesses hire app developers to build mobile apps that meet the target client’s needs. Within the healthcare sector, there’s a momentous boost in using mobile health apps, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown. Let’s take a look at the state of the mHealth market and benefits for healthcare professionals and patients.
The market of mobile apps in healthcare
Under the influence of digital transformation tendencies, the healthcare industry has been gathering momentum in implementing technological innovations. With the introduction of mHealth, patients and healthcare providers leverage the benefits of mobile health apps. As per recent forecasts, the global healthcare mobile application market size is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45% by 2027.
The mHealth market grows under the impact of preventive strategies in healthcare and funds mHealth start-ups to support this initiative. Additionally, consumers are more enthusiastic in terms of wellness and fitness, which also streamlines mHealth.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare apps were increasingly used to prevent doctors’ face-to-face contact with their patients. According to the report, a 14.3% increase is observed in the mHealth market influenced by COVID-19. The mHealth market’s offering is not limited by video chats, providing even more opportunities than ensuring social distancing. They range from clinical diagnosis and evaluation, medicine prescription, remote patient monitoring, etc.
Why are mobile health apps shaping the future of medical practice?
Mobile apps have the tremendous potential for boosting medical practiсes, and here is why health apps are important:
- The rise in chronic diseases drives the need for attending healthcare professionals to treat illnesses faster. mHealth apps also enable faster care service booking.
- In pandemic times, patients look for online consultations to avoid face-to-face contact. Healthcare providers also reduce workforce costs by providing mobile solutions for simple cases that don’t require professional assistance.
- It needs to reduce the time between diagnosis and treatment, which can be achieved through applying mobile health apps.
- Fitness and wellbeing apps are getting increasingly popular. Diet and healthy nutrition are now the major domains that are in demand.
Five benefits of mobile health apps
1. Provide mobile telemedicine video chat capabilities
Driven by the social distancing strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic, patients and general practitioners recognise the need for remote consultations. In 2020, the UK’s healthcare industry witnessed a rapid change in remote general practice consulting which reached 90% by April 2020. General practitioners focused remote consulting on monitoring older patients, shielding patients, and patients with poor mental health. Though video consulting was used rarely then telephone and text messaging, it may streamline telemedicine, conserving the best practises of face-to-face consulting. Accompanied by IoT-based monitoring systems, a general practitioner will have the means for tracking the daily progress of the patients. In addition to remote GP consulting, client support specialists can jump on the power of video chat capabilities, delivering a face-to-face consumer experience.
2. Ensure better health data gathering and remote patient monitoring
Mobile health apps that track daily data about the health state of patients enable faster access for doctors. This capability facilitates more informed and timely medical decision-making. Mobile health tracking also allows patients to store their medical records in one place and access them on the go. There are even mobile health systems that can detect the symptoms of serious illnesses and ease specific illness systems, for instance, Parkinson’s systems. By implementing mobile health apps in general practice and diagnostic matters, healthcare providers improve the wellbeing of patients.
3. Provide faster access to providers and care
The adoption of mobile devices by healthcare professionals has transformed many aspects of health care access and delivery. Through on-the-go access capability of mobile health apps, patients can make an appointment with a doctor faster or get a professional consultation about care services provided by a healthcare organisation.
With the rapid expansion of the healthcare marketplace, consumers now have a wide choice of care service offers consolidated within a single platform. Mobile apps may even replace telephone consultations and service booking, providing an alternative opportunity for consumers that prefer choosing a provider out of several market offers.
4. Improve provider communication and coordination
Accessing health records, managing schedules, connecting with patients and co-workers may be hard if organised right. Mobile health applications can boost the ability to connect the stakeholders across the healthcare organisation, allowing for secure health data storing and communication via texting and video chatting. Mobile devices can also be used for sending alerts about patients that have been admitted to the hospital or need urgent assistance.
5. Reduce costs for both patients and hospitals
According to statistics, 70%-80% of healthcare costs in the EU are spent on chronic diseases. The economies demand preventive means to reduce such high costs. Yet in 2015, the IQVIA Institute of Human Data Science researched the impact of health apps on the healthcare system and identified the potential for significant savings in the future. Another research concluded that using preventive health apps across diagnosing all diseases would save $46 billion annually. This is also related to patients that may significantly reduce spending on healthcare services by the early detection of symptoms.
Conclusion
Without any doubt, the rise of mHealth is tremendous and affects both patients and healthcare professionals’ experience. By investing in and applying mobile health apps, healthcare providers can improve customer loyalty or their brand and cut down costs. Therefore, entering the e-Health market alone is challenging, so it would be better to leverage the expertise of the industry professionals such as mobile app development company – Scand. The company has a team of mobile developers with experience in the healthcare domain that help healthcare organisations and technology start-ups reach the target consumers with the right application.
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