David Gulian, President of InfoLogix, Inc quotes in Medical Design as how Mobility acts as a catalyst in improving the effectiveness in health care which is a growing segment. Following is the excerpt of his article.

“The biggest impact that the transition to mobile solutions has had on the healthcare industry is that of improved efficiency, from both a patient care and a financial standpoint. Enterprise mobility solutions enable an important shift in how a typical healthcare organization functions. By placing tracking information in the hands of employees at the point of activity, medical institutions are empowered with better information about their operations, in real-time.

When the prevailing technology in healthcare amounts to just a pager and pen, as it historically has been, there is a significant risk for patients due to the lack of real-time access between clinicians and genuine coordination of care.  With a paper-based information system, aggregating patient information is a time-consuming challenge. Disconnected and proprietary information systems often lead to high error rates as physicians have to wade through data from multiple sources to find what they need. The healthcare system has grappled with this challenge of compiling and sharing information in a meaningful way for years.

The emergence of enterprise mobility solutions addresses this challenge by giving the healthcare industry real-time connectivity and the ability to streamline operations and improve productivity. By allowing employees to track inventory and assets in real-time, they are able to work with the most up-to-date information and make decisions based on that information, allowing for greater productivity, efficiency, and ultimately, revenues. “

Based in St. Louis, Rehabcare owns and operates 34 hospitals nationwide and also operates more than 1,000 facilities on behalf of hospital owners.

In the past, one worker in each of Rehabcare’s markets was responsible for filling in a seven page form about the patient by hand and faxing it to the medical directors at Rehabcare facilities who would then decide whether to take on the new patient. It was a time consuming process that was dependent on the legibility of the worker’s handwriting and on the medical director seeing the fax as soon as it came in. Rehabcare’s CEO felt that they are taking too long to respond. He requested his CIO to look at ways to improve this. The CIO had his team develop an iPhone app which eliminated the above mentioned paper based system of form filling. This cut down the patient referral process from an average of six to eight hours to one to two. Rehabcare can now also run reports in order to view how long it takes for medical directors to respond to those e-mails and how many referrals the company gets. Rehabcare has also deployed a second mobile app that accesses a service based in the cloud. The therapists use the app to view their schedules, look up patient information and start and stop their time clocks. By the end of the year, Rehabcare hopes to have deployed 8,000 iPod Touches so that therapists can use the application.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/209072/cloud_services_spur_mobile_enterprise_apps.html

Smartphone applications will enable the mobile health industry to successfully reach out to 500million of a total 1.4 billion smartphone users in 2015 the new “Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015” by research2guidance says.

Consumers are not only taking advantage of smartphones to manage and improve their own health, a significant number (43%) of mHealth applications are primarily designed for healthcare professionals. Mobile Applications for healthcare can be categorized in many ways. Few categories with examples under each category are:

Applications for Clinical or Assistance in Diagnosis

• Symptom checkers
• PHR access
• Digital imaging (MRI/X-Raying viewing abilities)
• Electronic chart review
• Lab results review

Applications for Remote Monitoring

• LifeScan for patients with diabetes
• Remote heart monitoring
• ECG viewer
• Oxygen level remote check
• Telehealth services