Essay preview
Personalized Mobile Health Care for Smartphones
June 5th, 2015
Prepared for
Dr. Susan Soroka
English3304- Section 02
Advanced Writing in Business Administration
Northeastern University- D’Amore McKim School of Business
Prepared by
Corey Hocking
Marketing and Supply Chain Management Major
Northeastern University- D’Amore McKim School of Business
Introduction
In the summer of 2014, Apple released its iHealth mobile application for the iPhone and with it, a toolbox for a repertoire of healthcare technology companies to begin creating their own health-based applications for patient convenience. These mobile applications will free up the time that General Practitioners typically allocate to a large number of patients, and give people the power and autonomy of managing their own health and being right in the loop with their current state. Now, companies are interested in taking this innovation to a new level in which certain applications will diagnose ear infections or track heart rhythms to a platform that can monitor mental health. The presence of these “Digital Medical Avatars” will not simply replace physicians, but will rather alter the relationship with the patient due to significantly less visits that will be needed.
That being said, how will practices handle the allocation of time between virtual appointments with patients and physical appointments at the actual practice? Will physicians and primary care clinicians become too distracted with data collection through these mobile applications and begin to lose a personal connection with their patients? How will the current growth rates of mobile health care either contribute to the up rise of this booming phenomenon or saturate such a penetrable industry? Also, how will companies assure confidentiality and top of the line security of health records, medical documents and other personal information? The following findings were retrieved through carefully conducted secondary research and will attempt to answer the previous questions. The research and findings will also greatly contribute to a brief conclusive statement regarding some speculation for the industry’s future.
Findings
Benefits and Capabilities of Mobile Health Care for In-Clinic and Out-of-Clinic Use
The existing model for the delivery of health information is rather outdated and causes an unnecessary amount of time and money for both patients and physicians. From the patient’s perspective, they have no single repository containing all of their health information when they have multiple doctors or switch providers. On the contrary, from the physicians’ perspective, the difficulty behind an organized database of medical files and patient information is not even fathomable to many of us. In an attempt to resolve such a haunting issue in the health care industry, mobile application developers have effectively established phone based systems that track personal health data, consisting of sophisticated hardware and applications that let patients sample and test their own blood, DNA, and urine for in home clinical convenience. These innovative smartphone device applications allow patients to automatically record their personal data and store it in their own medical profile that can then be transmitted to the medical professional in a secure fashion. The out-of-clinic frontier of mobile health ca...