The Digital Health Gap For High-Cost, High-Need Patients

This post was originally published on HealthPopuli.com on December 7, 2016.

Several market forces are converging that boost patients’ ability to engage in their health and self-care, including peoples’ growing adoption of smartphones, demand for self-service and DIY lifestyles, and Americans’ growing responsibility as health consumers. Health consumers are using a growing array of self-health tools, enabled through digital technologies. However, these tools aren’t yet engaging some of the very people who need them the most: high-need, high-cost patients.
Research into this situation is discussed in the December 2016 Health Affairs article, Many Mobile Heaath Apps Target High-Need, High-Cost Populations, But Gaps Remain, published in the December 2016 issue of Health Affairs. For context, this research focuses solely on mobile health apps, and not the larger topics of telehealth and remote health monitoring.
The team of researchers span several institutions,  including the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and the Asan Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. The team mined mHealth apps in the iTunes  and Google Play stores in February 2015. In addition, they searched medical special society websites for additional apps, as well as recommendations from experts in the field. To narrow down the apps for the high-cost, high-need patient population, the researchers focused on many search terms of common chronic c...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - December 8, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Health Health Reform Patients Uncategorized Source Type: blogs