The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 8

Deploying mHealth: Overcoming Barriers to Adoption
Continued from page 5

oversight of multiple systems.

EASE OF USE
The manner and style in which a user
interacts with the technology is a significant factor in terms of adoption. It
is critical that a solution can be easily
integrated into existing care pathways
without necessitating additional burden
or complication to the user.
Usability factors are a major obstacle to
health information technology adoption.
While health IT such as mHealth tools
can offer potential benefits, they can also
interrupt workflow, cause delays, and
introduce errors[2][3]. Lack of attention to
health IT evaluation may result in dissatisfied users, decreased effectiveness, and
increases in error costs. While the promise of mobile health is that we can leverage the power and ubiquity of mobile
and cloud technologies to monitor and
manage side effects and treatment outside the clinical setting, it is essential to
be attentive to usability, keeping in mind
its intended users, task and environment.
User interface design can be even more
contentious when dealing with patients
as the end user. In a professional environment there is often technical support
available should it be required, however,
a patient at home is often unlikely to have
access to similar resources. Therefore,
the solution must be designed so that it
can be easily understood, and so that it
performs the task required without the
need for unnecessary intervention from
the user. Intuitive systems, that can perform complex monitoring and analysis,
should be built into back-end elements
of the solution, leaving the user-facing
aspects to be simple and user-friendly.
Designers also need to accept that users
will have different social and technological intelligence, meaning that a solution
needs to be designed so that it will perform, as desired, for different users.

6

Small text, poor colour contrast, overly
complex menu systems, confusing settings, extended load times, and connection problems, can all cause difficulties.
As a result, research must be undertaken
in order to ensure that mobile health
technologies are appropriately designed
and targeted to the end-users’ needs,
before they are used as health inter-

June 2014

ventions[3].

QUALITY
Increasing numbers of healthcare professionals are using smartphones and
their associated applications in daily clinical care. While these medical applications hold great potential for improving
clinical practice, little is known about the
possible dangers associated with their
use. Breaches of patient confidentiality,
conflicts of interests and malfunctioning clinical decision-making tools could
all negatively impact on care. A significant number of medical applications
lack authenticity details; authors, manufacturers and distributors are not listed,
and references are unavailable or out-ofdate[4].
It has been proposed that medical applications should be peer-reviewed by clinical experts and that regulatory measures
should be increased in order to safeguard
quality of care. This would allow healthcare professionals to be made aware
which digital solutions lack evidence and
professional involvement in their design
and development[5]. (See article: “The
Changing Face Of Healthcare: Quality
in Medical Applications” on page 45).

ENGAGEMENT
Maintaining engagement with digital
solutions is essential to ensure that they
continue to be useful. Among patients
in particular, the initial enthusiasm for
using digital health applications to manage their own health, tends to wane fairly
quickly. Developers and solution providers must therefore design systems in ways
that continue to engage with users, and

to encourage long-term adherence. This
is an area that a number of companies
are successfully beginning to navigate,
by developing a whole range of ways to
incentivise and encourage active engagement (See article: “Engaging Patients
Using mHealth” on page 35).

CONSUMERISATION OF
HEALTHCARE
The changing demands on healthcare
systems are forcing providers to begin
to consider patients as consumers. Techsavvy patients are used to managing so
many aspects of their lives, with the
assistance of technology, that they are
beginning to demand to do the same
with their health. As a result providers
need to consider new ways of engaging
and providing access to services, which
means laterally diversify into offering
technology to support their core competencies.
As we have already discussed many difficulties can arise when you begin to scale
these types of technologies. As a result
healthcare professionals and care organisations should not have to be distracted
from their main care priorities, by issues
of technical management. In order to
prevent this from happening care organisations need to enter into strategic partnerships with technology and digital
solution providers, who can handle the
technical aspects of deployment. Partnership strategies can work very effectively, but, they do still require significant
oversight and central management, by
the care organisation, in order to ensure
that a coherent package of services is
delivered. Commissioning partnerships
also requires service level agreements,