Myriads of Possibilities: How mHealth Changes Patient Care

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Nowadays, most businesses have their own apps for the convenience of consumers. The same applies to healthcare providers and their products — mHealth apps.

According to Statista, the global mHealth market reached 16.9 million USD in 2022 alone. This growth is expected to continue, with forecasts saying the market could grow to 50.5 million USD by 2025.

This clearly shows that the industry’s future is in creating mHealth apps. So, let’s discuss what healthcare apps are and how to develop them.

mHealth Apps and Their Benefits

In the healthcare sector, mHealth is an umbrella term which includes a wide range of apps and appliances with the same goal at the end — to elevate patients’ wellness.

Such apps focus on providing healthcare services and information using real-time remote patient monitoring to give tips for a healthy lifestyle.

The benefits of such solutions are in the ability to provide access to healthcare and promote healthy lifestyles for patients.

• Convenience: Generally, having services accessible through a smartphone is more convenient compared to other methods. For example, if the user doesn’t have a hospital around them and they have questions about mental health, it can be almost impossible to find a convenient solution offline. This is where mHealth apps can help.
• Health monitoring: Another great thing about these solutions is real-time monitoring. By connecting wearable tech like smartwatches to the app, it can monitor a patient’s health metrics. For example, a smartwatch can track their heart rate and sleep patterns, or their phone can track how many steps they take in a day.
• Remote consultations: Let’s be honest: no one likes to go to the doctor’s office. It takes a lot of time, and the whole process can be dreadful. With mHealth apps, it’s a problem from yesterday. The user can consult their doctor remotely via chat or video call.
• Medication management: Some patients may skip their treatment because they forget about it, and this can lead to worse outcomes for them. In order to solve this issue, mHealth apps can remind users to take their medication and keep track of their regime. This improves adherence and ensures expected health improvements from medication.
• Health education: Medical professionals often discourage patients from researching medical information on their own since it can lead to wrong conclusions about their health. Thankfully, mHealth apps can provide supportive information about physical well-being and help patients make informed decisions about it.
• Lifestyle tracking: In order to make a solution more engaging, some businesses include methods to track users’ progress. It generally improves patient care by encouraging users to make healthier choices.
• Emergency assistance: Some mHealth apps offer emergency call features in addition to regular healthcare services. This feature includes distress contact information, location tracking, and alerts for situations when the user needs assistance.
• Data sharing: There isn’t much point in tracking your health if you don’t know what to do with gathered analytic data! That’s why mobile health apps include data sharing with healthcare providers.
• Personalized recommendations: By analyzing the user’s health-related data, some of the solutions can provide suggestions that will improve the patient’s well-being. For example, recommendations for exercising or supportive information about the diet type.
• Cost-efficiency: The cost of routine consultations or monitoring can add up and become expensive for some patients. mHealth apps are more cost-effective in that regard.

The benefits of mHealth apps are quite extensive, but so is their variety. Before we go into the details of mHealth app development, let’s cover the main types of mobile healthcare solutions.

Types of Healthcare Apps

There are a lot of different types of mobile health apps. Some of them focus only on one specific function, while others can include the whole set of healthcare services. In this article, we will focus on the most common types of wellness solutions.

Telemedicine Apps

This type focuses on allowing both patient and doctor to communicate remotely. It also provides a way for remote patient monitoring and access to clinical records. Let’s cover how it works from both sides.

The process from the patient side looks like this:

1. Patient registers on the app;
2. They fill in their profile with health information;
3. They search for the required doctor and place an appointment;
4. The patient communicates with the doctor via text chat or video call.

For doctors, the process is similar:

1. Doctor registers on the app;
2. They fill in the information on their profile;
3. They go through credentials verification procedure;
4. They check their calendar to see the next scheduled patient and their information;
5. The doctor communicates with the patient via text chat or video call.

Wearable Apps

The name of this type is self-explanatory. It’s a solution that can be installed on wearable accessories. Think smartwatches, fitness trackers, or smart glasses.

Some people might confuse wearable software with mobile solutions. To clear up this confusion, let’s compare them:

• Wearable solutions have limited functionality compared to their mobile counterparts;
• Wearable apps require less interaction and input from the user;
• Wearable software uses device-specific APIs, while mobile solutions are often cross-platform;
• Wearable apps have supporting mobile apps, while mobile software is standalone.

Wearable technologies are used to collect patient’s health-related data by monitoring their vitals. This data can be used later by the healthcare organization to determine a patient’s diagnosis or detect diseases.

Medical Reference Apps

These solutions are different from others since they are primarily used by doctors. The healthcare industry is constantly changing, and it’s often difficult to keep track of the new latest updates in methods of treatment.

Medical reference solutions provide doctors with access to a vast database of medical information. For example, it includes disease symptoms, treatment guidelines, medical calculators, and so on.

The main idea behind such apps is to provide easy and quick access to information for medical training and the general convenience of healthcare providers. As a result, they enhance the efficiency and accuracy of medical decision-making.

Personal Health Records Apps

Picture this: a patient has moved cities and wants to get set up with a new doctor there. This usually means that the patient needs to drag their medical records from one doctor to another.

On top of that, the doctor might require additional information, which means the patient needs to go back to their original clinic or doctor and request it. Sounds pretty tedious, right?

This is the exact problem personal health records apps solve. Also known as electronic health records (EHR), they store all of the relevant information about a patient’s health history and conditions.

Electronic health records are usually developed by clinics, but there are also third-party versions to make the process of changing healthcare providers that much easier.

Wellness Apps

The general logic behind these solutions is to promote a healthy lifestyle. Think specialized fitness solutions or health monitoring systems. Wellness apps come in different flavors:

• Fitness: These are designed to help patients with personalized recommendations for workout routines and diets. With recent advancements, we have already seen some of these solutions utilize AI for enhanced fitness plans that are tailored to the user.

If you are interested in creating fitness solutions with AI integration, we at CHI Software can provide you with generative AI consulting today and help you step into the field of mobile health apps.

• Mental health: Provides patients with information and supportive resources for managing mental health and life strategies, as well as increased access to healthcare providers and therapists.
• Nutrition and meal planning: These apps serve as “digital nutritionists” by offering custom meal plans and calorie counters. Recently, we’ve even seen integration with grocery shopping platforms.
• Femtech apps: Femtech is short for female technology. They focus on providing wellness support for women’s health needs — think period trackers and maternity apps.

And this is not all! We cover the most interesting part in our original article. There, you will find a real-market solution explained in detail, a step-by-step development guide with cost estimation, and how to solve the most common challenges. Click to read!