How Mobile Health Is Revolutionizing Patient Empowerment and Experience

There have been many attempts to get people more involved in their health. Yet as the growing rates of obesity and chronic conditions such as diabetes show, these attempts have not achieved the hoped-for results. The problem isn’t desire—people want to feel healthy. The issue has been that these solutions were too demanding and did not engage people on their terms.

Mobile Makes it Easier to Participate in Your Own Health

Mobile technology is changing the playing field, making it easier for people to understand and take charge of their health—on their terms, at their time. It has transformed the way we do everything from managing finances to communicating with loved ones after a disaster. It is more intimate, more personal than a computer—and more powerful in many ways. By being online and with you all the time, mobile allows you to access information wherever you are, quickly and discreetly.

This ability to tap in “any time, any place” results in more accurate data. Did eating help relieve the headache, or trigger it? Armed with more precise insights into one’s own behaviors and patterns, a person can start to take action to reach better health outcomes.

This additional data also enhances doctor-patient communication and enables doctors to make better, more personalized decisions regarding patient care.

The Mobile Revolution Has Just Begun

There are few technologies that have the power to touch and influence people around the world the way mobile does:

• The number of people using the mobile Web is expected to surpass PCs as the most popular way to get online by 2015.1
• This is particularly true for many developing countries, like India, where 59 percent of users access the Web only through their mobile device; in Egypt, the number rises to 70 percent.1
• More than 500 million people, or about 30 percent of an estimated 1.4 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide, will be using mobile health apps by 2015.2

This global footprint will be coupled with increasingly powerful and more sophisticated handsets, resulting in a new generation of mobile health solutions. Phones will have faster processors, better screens and more complex sensors, making them powerful tools that can not only track how far and how fast you’ve walked, but one day soon, will also scan barcodes to tell you if a food is healthy or not, or measure your heart rate and immediately communicate this information back to your doctor.

MedHelp’s John de Souza Engages Mobile Audiences about their Health

Putting Mobile to Work for Health

GE healthymagination and MedHelp recently partnered to launch a series of mobile apps that are empowering people to take control of their health in a way that only mobile can. These apps leverage both the simplicity and the power of mobile. For instance, the Moody Me app allows people to track their mood throughout the day and note what affects it. By tapping into their camera phone, Moody Me users can take pictures of things that make them happy or sad to see what triggers changes in mood. Users can also record things like medications to see how effective treatments are.

These apps, which have been downloaded more than half a million times, are in the hands of people around the world, providing solutions to common health issues, like helping women have healthier pregnancies and encouraging long-term weight loss.

Apps like this are just the beginning. By putting the power to manage one’s health literally in the palms of a person’s hands, mobile is transforming healthcare.

[1] “Global mobile statistics 2011: all quality mobile marketing research, mobile Web stats, subscribers, ad revenue, usage, trends…”  MobiThinking, March 2011.

[2] Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010–2015. Research2Guidance.