Today, most people use mobile phones for various purposes in their daily life. It is a device that has become an essential need for everyone. In August 2019, more than 5.13 billion people had a mobile phone worldwide, as reported by GSMA real-time intelligence data. Thus, it can be said that a device used by 66.53% of the world’s population can play a vital role in providing healthcare.
Mobile health or mHealth is becoming very popular among people as it is easy to access, log into patient portals, track their steps and glucose, and manage their medication and condition.
The use of mHealth applications has brought a revolution in healthcare. Moreover, due to mHealth, many patients are more likely to comply with their doctors and physicians, as help is available at any time. Now, it’s time to discuss the four benefits of mobile phones in the healthcare system.
Quick Access to Care Providers:
The most important benefit of mobile health is that the patients can quickly connect with their physicians, send secure messages, schedule appointments, get test results, etc. Unlike traditional telephone calls, mobile health applications offer more services. Moreover, people use mHealth applications to access the service of telemedicine.
Telemedicine is one of the fastest growing services and is popular among patients as it helps them to connect with their physician without any physical visit. Simply put, you can meet up with your physician using your mobile or tablet. Most hospitals are adopting telemedicine to deliver better services to patients. They have created a network of physicians, as well as additional physicians for after-hours and weekends.
Easy Remote Monitoring:
Another advantage of using mobile health applications is easy remote monitoring. It is a subcategory of home care and telehealth, allowing a patient to use a mobile phone to enter, gather, and collect health data and further transmit it to healthcare providers or physicians.
In addition, remote monitoring helps physicians track the health of their patients between visits, and when a patient is in distress, they can know it certainly and visit them for help. It is the most outstanding achievement in-home care and managing care. Without devices such as mobile phones, watches, fitness trackers, and wristbands, it is impossible to keep track of a patient’s health. Most of the time, remote monitoring is used for patients with chronic illnesses or conditions.
Improves Safety of Patients:
It is hard for a patient to recall the names of medicines that they are taking. This problem especially occurs with elderly patients, polypharmacy patients (patients taking more than four medicines each day), and patients that are at high-risk. It is a fact that a patient cannot recall their list of prescribed medications to their physician or nurse.
It can cause discrepancies and can put patients’ health at significant risk. If a clinician is unaware of the patient’s medications, there are more chances of the wrong prescription that can harm the patient’s health. The wrong prescription can cause adverse drug reactions in a patient’s body leading to hospitalisation or even death. mHealth applications help a patient to keep their prescriptions recorded in one place, it can help in providing quick access to the patient’s prescription history and dosage changes.
Better Medication Adherence:
It is generally observed that many patients do not take proper care of their medications. It is hard to control the patient’s medication once they are discharged from the hospital. Poor medication adherence results in worsening health outcomes or hospital readmission.
However, mHealth applications and mobile technology solutions help improve medication adherence by providing reminders for taking medication and refilling educational information, tracking remaining pills, etc.
Conclusion:
The benefits of mHealth applications or mobile health technology will continue to expand and evolve to support patients. As you know, today everybody uses mobile phones through which it is easy to keep track of their health. Managing their conditions and keeping track of their medication is easy through mHealth applications.
The frequent use of mHealth applications will bring many benefits to the healthcare system. It will become a necessity in the healthcare system. Hopefully, in this article, we were able to help you understand the benefits of mobile phones in healthcare.
