Why not today?

Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine

In the midst of a week that included both the further mapping of meaningful use and the release of the proposed rules for ACOs, the message of the mHealth Initiative Conference in Chicago may have been easy to miss. However, it shouldn’t be ignored.

Careful steps are vital to move the national health IT strategy forward in the same direction, but DIY has a place—formal or not—in improving healthcare as well. As mHealth Initiative vendors and clinicians put it, m-health is a way to use every means available to improve care, even non-healthcare-specific devices and systems. If more patient engagement is a requirement for meaningful use, why not try using email or text messages to see which mode best facilitates that engagement? As several presenters made clear, patients want to communicate with their providers in different ways, and current mobile technologies can accommodate those preferences.

Likewise, new video and wireless products targeted at consumers may facilitate clinician collaboration. If you can click on an application on your smartphone or PC and determine which of your colleagues is online and accessible for a consult, why not do so? If you can use an accelerometer and GPS unit to monitor the movements of a patient suffering from a chronic disease, why not enlist those tools to get an accurate sense of that patient’s relative mobility over time?

The vanguard isn’t for everyone, of course. Privacy and security concerns and the accompanying specter of litigation are constraints for some; the lack of consistent reimbursement policies for telephone or email consults is also a confounding factor. And as a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week stated, the digital divide between more affluent and less well-off patients’ use of PHRs is still very much with us. Mobile phone use might be pervasive in this country, but that doesn’t mean everyone has smartphone capabilities on those phones, much less a PC and an internet connection. Many people in this country have neither. Would their care suffer in a more mobile health system if, for example, they couldn’t use email or check in for appointments online?

Mobilized medicine must extend to these patients as well, and some mHealth Initiative sessions addressed ways to deliver better care for the underserved. In fact, all of the real-world examples of m-health in use today demonstrated why there must be room in the U.S. healthcare system for these innovators and others to come.

Has m-health arrived at your organization? Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com.