If you want a mobile health app today, you likely need to head over to an app store that caters to your device or its operating system. According to mHealth developers who responded to a recent Research2Guidance survey, in 2015 sales of mobile health apps will be largely driven by recommendations from healthcare providers. Here are seven reasons R2G believes its survey respondents are right on:
1. Growing awareness: The growing awareness of mHealth in the medical community, as well as the growing proportion of patients using smartphones, will encourage healthcare professionals to exploit the possibilities rendered by smartphone technology and incorporate applications into their patient management plans.
2. Incentives: Specialized distribution providers will develop business models that will allow doctors to recommend applications and profit from downloads. They could, for example, receive a share of revenues from downloads or subscription fees from specialized mHealth app stores.
3. Sponsored apps: Applications that improve the efficacy of a particular treatment would be popular with pharmaceutical/device manufacturers, as doctors would be more likely to prescribe their products. Pharma/device companies would sponsor application development and encourage doctors to prescribe their products in conjunction with applications, which doctors would do because the application would improve patient outcomes, thereby giving the company’s product a competitive edge.
4. Patient demand: An increasing number of “tech-savvy” patients, understanding the benefits of mHealth applications, will expect treatment or convenient communication with healthcare professionals to be facilitated by applications.
5. Differentiation: Tech-savvy healthcare professionals will make use of innovative solutions to differentiate their practice and stay ahead of the competition.
6. Shortage of physicians: In areas that have always suffered because of the low number of healthcare professionals, such as rural areas or in the developing world, mobile applications allow patients to connect remotely to healthcare providers like physicians. Healthcare professionals active in these regions are already making use of this exciting opportunity to improve healthcare delivery. Treatment quality is improved, and from a health economics point-of-view, costs are reduced as travel times and distances are diminished and physicians get to see more patients.
7. Cost pressure: The increasing cost of healthcare is forcing both public and commercial healthcare providers to test and deploy cost-effective solutions. Within the next few years the market will include numerous mHealth solutions that will have successfully provided proof of concept.
More from Research2Guidance here
