The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 6

mHealth...What Does it Really Mean?

mHealth...
What Does it Really Mean?
Mobile digital solutions have revolutionised the way in which consumers
engage with many industries, e.g. banking, retail, and travel. The provision
of access to data and services through
relevant, timely, mobile systems helps
promote informed consumers, and
improve the working business practices
of those industries, ultimately, resulting
in cost efficiencies and improvements
to service provision. The benefits have
been widely accepted and the technology has become entrenched within the
daily activities of those industry providers and the way in which they interact with their customers and conversely
the methods by which those customers
can access information, products, and
services.
The ‘digital health’ revolution has
been long-awaited. For many years
now, there has been a considerable
amount of discussion and planning for
fully-integrated and mobile care solutions that should have the potential to
change the composition of the traditional care continuum. However, the
reality has often been significantly less
successful than the rhetoric. Many of
the promises of digital healthcare and
mhealth have yet to be witnessed, particularly at scale.
Many view the ultimate goal for the
integration of digital into healthcare as
being the tool that will allow the complete system to reach a symbolic ‘tipping point’. By which it is suggested
that the system of healthcare delivery
would be ‘flipped’ from the current status quo of care delivery

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April 2014

dictated by care providers in primary
(doctors) or secondary (hospital) led
treatment environments, to a situation
of personalised care provision, where
‘you’ the patient and ‘your’ individual
care requirements dictate the care pathway. Digital is obviously not the only
factor in reaching such a radical change
in the way healthcare is delivered, but is
most likely to be the tool that facilitates
the process.
What we are finally beginning to see
is an institutional change in perceptions across the healthcare ecosystem,
leading to wider adoption of modern
mobile and digital solutions, that have
the potential to significantly change
the way in which modern healthcare is
delivered.
We still have a long way to go before
this type of care model becomes the
reality, and there are many barriers to
overcome, not least in terms of policy,
data and protocol standards, compliance, and strategy, all of which will
need to become standardised across
the health sector and ideally across

geographical regions, in order to facilitate the exchange of information and
data between systems. The likelihood
of this happening in the short-term is
improbable, however, that is not to say
that technology is not already beginning to radically and systematically alter
the way in which care is delivered.
Current technology has started to provide this personalised level of care
across a number of health sectors, and
as these systems become more widely
available and entrenched within working practice and clinical procedure, then
the possibilities for providing treatment
characterised by the individual become
much more likely.
It is in this realm of personalised care
where the subject of mobile health or
mhealth has become synonymous. The
term itself, however, can be extremely
difficult to define and its scope problematic to determine.
mHealth has different meanings for
different people. Many patients, health
consumers, and to a large extent health-