Victoria
L. Tiase, MSN, RN-BC
PhD
Student, College of Nursing
University
of Utah
With
the advent of the smartphone, we have more data at our fingertips than ever
before. According to the Pew Research Center, 95% of
Americans now own a cellphone of some kind and just over one-in-ten American
adults are “smartphone-only” internet users - meaning they own a smartphone,
but do not have traditional home broadband service. Android users have access
to over 2.8 million apps and it’s estimated that there are over 165,000 health-related
smartphone apps available for public use.
Health care apps are used for a variety of reasons such as health
promotion, disease management and communication with providers. However, for as ‘smart’ as we’ve become,
there are still many unanswered questions worthy of research:
1) Are users interested in using health apps
and if so, how will they be used?
2) Are providers prepared to receive
another source of data? What are the
integration and visualization needs?
3)
Can mHealth data help us understand more about populations? What is the role of mHealth data in the
co-production of health?
The
Supplier
Health
related applications are used for a variety of purposes. Users are armed with data to make decisions,
track vital signs or refill prescriptions from the palm of their hand. Apple’s HealthKit and Google Fit allow users to bring together health
data from multiple apps to be collated and organized for easy view. The movement towards consumer-directed
exchange is encouraging the development of methods to pull data from your
medical records from your provider to an app on your phone allowing for sharing
to chosen family members or providers.
All allowing users to have a vast amount of health data.
However,
very few apps are evidenced based. Additionally, a method to certify or
credential health apps does not exist today.
It is unclear to what extent users understand the associated privacy and
security issues with mHealth data; exactly what is being collected on their
smartphone and who has access to it. In addition, little work has been done to
examine the health literacy issues; whether they are the same or different when
it comes to mHealth data. With these
issues in mind, it is important to research the use aspects of health apps considering
the development of new education strategies may be needed.
The
Translator
Providers are still recovering from
the transition from paper to electronic medical records and are left making
sense of the sea of data that is constantly produced. However, mHealth data can be an additional
rich source of data that may not be captured during a visit assessment due to
lack of time or poor recall. Some mHealth apps can serve as powerful tools to
enhance the patient-provider dialogue and support shared decision making and
thus add value to the relationship by allowing for communication that extends
beyond the visit. But many providers are not prepared to collect and analyze
mHealth data. A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that
the ability for providers to integrate data from mHealth devices is
lacking. Work is needed to understand
how to make mHealth data actionable at the point-of-care in accordance with
clinical workflows for greatest leverage.
.......................................
The
Co-Production Future
According to Dr. David Nash, “85 percent of a population’s
well-being, its quality of life, is due to factors other than medical care”
which means that only about 15% of healthcare occurs inside the four walls of a
hospital or practice setting.
Ubiquitously, mHealth data allows for the collection of data anywhere,
anytime. It has potential to put
patients in control of their personalized data and potentially, their
health. This can lead to a shift to the
co-production of health by which patients and providers partner together, both
experts armed with data, allowing healthcare to become relationship centered.
The deluge
of mHealth data provides many opportunities to study ways to encourage behavior
change, foster healthy lifestyles and support better management of chronic
conditions. Research is needed in the
areas of usability, education and health care outcomes. Ultimately the use of mHealth apps has the potential
to encourage and empower patients, reduce workload on the system and improve
health. Our data research strategies
should anticipate this future.
Links to Hyperlinked Text:
Dr. David Nash: http://www.jefferson.edu/university/population-health/faculty-staff/faculty/nash.html
Additional
Reading:
Batalden, M., Batalden, P., Margolis, P., Seid, M.,
Armstrong, G., Opipari-Arrigan, L., & Hartung, H. (2015). Coproduction of
healthcare service. BMJ Quality Safety, bmjqs-2015.
Lobelo, F., Kelli, H. M., Tejedor, S. C., Pratt, M.,
McConnell, M. V., Martin, S. S., & Welk, G. J. (2016). The wild wild west:
A framework to integrate mhealth software applications and wearables to support
physical activity assessment, counseling and interventions for cardiovascular
disease risk reduction. Progress in cardiovascular diseases, 58(6), 584-594.
Schnall, R., Rojas, M., Bakken, S., Brown, W., Carballo-Dieguez,
A., Carry, M., ... & Travers, J. (2016). A user-centered model for
designing consumer mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps).
Journal of
biomedical informatics, 60, 243-251.
Woldeyohannes, H. O., & Ngwenyama, O. K. (2017, July).
Factors Influencing Acceptance and Continued Use of mHealth Apps. In
International Conference on HCI in Business, Government, and Organizations (pp.
239-256). Springer, Cham.
No comments:
Post a Comment