The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 44

Quality Assurance in the Age of Mobile Healthcare

Quality Assurance in the Age of
Mobile Healthcare
The Journal of mHealth, Vol 01 Issue 02 (2014) pp 42-46
Received: 10 February 2014

Dieter Speidel, Mithun Sridharan
PASS Switzerland, Dufourstrasse 91, CH-8008, Zurich, Switzerland
Keywords: Evidence-Based Testing, Apps, Crowd Testing, Healthcare IT, mHealth, Mobile, Models, Outsourcing, Patients, Provider, Quality, Requirements,
Service, Software, Testing, Stakeholders, Consumer Centricity, On-demand, Flexibility, Cost savings, Efficiency

ABSTRACT
The increasing adoption and use of mobile technologies is disrupting the Healthcare industry. This phenomenon has created innovative ways, channels and tools
to deliver healthcare cost-effectively even in the remotest of places. Among the
material issues that existing mHealth Applications (Apps) face are quality,
accuracy and reliability. Most mHealth Apps aren’t downloaded that often and
physicians are generally hesitant to recommend applications because they don’t
trust them. One of the biggest challenges is in getting mHealth Apps tested and
validated under real-world conditions with a large and constantly growing variety
of mobile devices and operating system versions, which need to be supported by
such Apps. It could be easily inferred that traditional in-house or outsourced
verification and validation methods can no longer cope with the challenges given
by today’s exploding world of mobile devices and the global user landscape. Software applications with a high Defect Exposure Factor (DEF) i.e. criticality as
a measure of immediate customer exposure post release such as mHealth Apps,
are excellent candidates for ‘crowdtesting’.

MOBILE APPLICATIONS (APPS) IN
HEALTHCARE IT
A quick search for “health” on Apple iTunes store returns over
43,000 Apps, demonstrating a high demand for such applications. According to the US Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), mobile healthcare (mHealth) Apps were downloaded
an estimated 660 million times as of June 2013. By 2015, 500
million smartphone users worldwide are expected to regularly
use some healthcare application; by 2018, industry experts
expect 1.7 billion mobile users to use mHealth Apps on a
fairly regularly basis. These users include general consumers,
patients, doctors and other healthcare professionals. Realising this growing interest, independent App developers and
companies, such as Nike and Walgreens, alike have released
several Apps around weight loss and general physical fitness. Besides these lifestyle Apps, the number of Healthcare
Apps supporting serious use cases, such as: Patient diagnosis;
remote patient and health information monitoring; patient
therapy management; epidemic alerts, etc; and productivity
Apps for doctors, physicians, healthcare professionals, hospitals and other healthcare institutions is also exponentially growing.

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April 2014

DIY TOOLS DISRUPTING THE
HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
These developments mark a turning point in the history of
the healthcare industry. Mobile Apps are radically changing the way doctors and patients interact and approach
health care. Using a smartphone, a mobile application and
an additional portable device, it is now possible for anyone
to instantly get an electro-cardiogram (EKG) reading, giving
patients a simple and easy means to keep track of their heart
conditions. Wall Street Journal cites a case experienced by Dr.
Eric Topol, cardiologist and Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Topol’s
patients started E-Mailing him the results of do-it-yourself
(DIY) electrocardiograms:

I

am getting emails from people saying, “I’m in atrial
fibrillation—what do I do?” The first time I saw that in
the subject line of an email, I said, the world has really
changed.

Doctors regard such developments as real time savers with
tremendous potential to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce costs,
increase transparency and make health care more affordable
by speeding diagnosis, improving monitoring and reducing
unnecessary visits to a physician or hospital. Many Apps have
been designed in consultation with the doctors themselves
and these range from information databases about drugs and
diseases to sophisticated monitors that read patients’ symptoms and diagnostic data.

CHALLENGES FACING mHEALTH APPS
Though it is widely agreed that mHealth Apps have the potential to revolutionise healthcare, these trends are not without
challenges. Among the material issues that existing mHealth
Apps face are quality, accuracy and reliability. Despite the
number of mHealth applications available for download from
App stores, only a small number of those applications have