Report Spotlights mHealth’s Potential to Improve Care

The mHealth market is set to take off due to the impetus provided by public and private stakeholders across the healthcare spectrum to modernize and streamline this overburdened sector, according to a new report by business intelligence expert GlobalData.

The new report shows that the rapid emergence of mHealth technology will revolutionize future healthcare delivery and management by saving lives and reducing the economic burden imposed by growing chronic conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Governments across the world are now implementing public health pilots that use mHealth to promote connected care delivery and management across their network of healthcare sites. Providers see mHealth as a means of improving their productivity, while consumers are keen to adopt these technologies in order to integrate medical treatments with their lifestyle unobtrusively.

Mobile technology has been adapted to enhance healthcare delivery and management throughout the last decade, during which period mobile technology has become essential in all aspects of day-to-day life. The digitalization of medical information for exchange through a connected healthcare infrastructure demonstrates the key changes taking place to attempt to modernize the medical market space.

The emergence of mobile technology in the healthcare arena has also been propelled by the global financial crisis, which resulted in a renewed focus on improving cost efficiency, the improvement of clinical outcomes, and the quality of care provided to patients at home.

mHealth technologies have the potential to address these key shortcomings in healthcare delivery, while imposing a lower economic burden. They have been shown to improve patient and physician convenience; enable remote monitoring; and improve care-coordination among medical professionals, patients, and public health systems. This has proven to be particularly effective in the remote monitoring and management of chronic illnesses, reducing health expenditure while encouraging consumer-centric medical care.

A notable increase in mHealth related product development, market consolidation and the emergence of health-related businesses demonstrates the impact mHealth is having on vendors in the healthcare spectrum. In particular, companies from the telecom and IT sectors are expected to benefit.

Given these trends, the mHealth market is expected to significantly revolutionize healthcare delivery and management in the future, growing in value from an estimated $0.5 billion in 2010 to over $8 billion by 2018.

Source: GlobalData