mHealth Defined

I remember attending a small event about 18 months ago that focused on the convergence of mobile and health. It was sponsored by a digital agency and the audience was made up of pharma people. The panelists were from mobile or digital research companies. One of them said, “If you didn’t get the Web right, forget about it. Move on. Mobile is where you need to focus.” I laughed then, but today I agree. mHealth’s potential to influence wellness and health outcomes worldwide can not be underestimated.

Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet Project posted a video of her talk The Power of Mobile, which she presented in September at a Mayo Clinic event.  I highly recommend viewing this video, or at least reading the transcript.  Susannah always provides so much more than data – her insights are what I look for.  In her words, “Mobile was the final front in the access revolution. It has erased the digital divide. A mobile device is the internet for many people.  Access isn’t the point anymore. It’s what people are doing with the access that matters.”

So what are people doing with mobile? Quite a bit. The lexicon can be confusing (at least to me) – many terms are thrown around like mobile health, mHealth, wireless medicine, telemedicine, telehealth. I happen to like the simplicity of mHealth. For a realistic definition, I turned to Dr. Felasfa Wodajo, a bone and soft tissue tumor surgeon in northern Virginia who is also senior editor at iMedicalApps. In his opinion mHealth refers to the use of mobile technologies to promote health and treat disease, especially when one of the users of the technology is a patient.

Here are some concrete examples of mHealth (in my opinion):

• A liver transplant patient receives a text message reminding her to take medication
• An ER physician receives an incoming patient’s EKG on his smartphone
• A patient with arrhythmia wears a monitor that records and transmits cardiac events wirelessly to his cardiologist
• Community health workers in rural Malawi use SMS to coordinate emergency care and track patients
• A neurologist whips out his Blackberry and checks ePocrates before e-prescribing a new drug
• A PCP uses the iStethoscope app on her iPhone to listen to a patient’s heartbeat and emails a copy to the office

For me, the best example of mHealth happened about a month ago when I took my son to the dentist. I checked in and the administrator immediately handed me an iPad and asked me to update my information. I was floored.  The patient intake form was a bit cumbersome, but I happily complied and supplied all of the requested information. I am hoping that my other physicians will embrace mobile, too.