How Mobile is Personalizing Healthcare
By Luke Rabin, Director of Product Development, Creo Wellness
There’s a good chance that at least one person in your accounting office wears a Fitbit. And someone in IT tracks their fertility using an app that tells them the optimal time to attempt pregnancy, and still another tracks calories using a weight loss app.
These consumer-facing health technologies have already changed the way individuals interact with wellness, making real-time feedback, relevant reporting and community engagement the norm in this digital wellness ecosystem. Homes are connected, too. Amazon’s Alexa devices create a framework for integrated technology that not only interacts with users but also learns and adapts to their habits. And, it is quite possible that at your last doctor’s visit, at least one clinician used a mobile device while measuring and recording your health data.
Businesses in all industries are adopting the use of mobile devices.
The power of this growing network of devices, often called the Internet of Things (IoT), means that the smartest businesses, in every industry, recognize one imperative: the ability to develop and deploy engaging mobile experiences, for customers and employees, will determine whether they will lead or follow in their market.
Consider the stunning projection from networking giant Cisco that the number of connected devices in the world will rise from 15 billion today to over 50 billion in 2020, just four short years away.
In a recent survey of healthcare providers conducted by HIMSS, 90% of respondents reported they use mobile devices to engage patients and 73% engaged with patients through app-enabled portals. What is becoming clear is that mobility isn’t just part of the healthcare ecosystem: the devices and processes enabled by mobile technology are changing healthcare. Adoption is occurring in several different sectors:
- Health care professionals engage with mobile apps for purposes of administration, health record management and access, patient consulting, information gathering and medical education.1 Take Doximity, for example, an app that promotes collaboration by enabling physicians to communicate with colleagues, network in their specialty and even earn continuing ed credits, all in a HIPAA-secure mobile environment.
- Wearable and mobile health devices, such as handheld ultrasound and lab-on-a-chip technology, allows for real-time data collection and analysis in clinical settings.2 Glucose sensors, vaginal fertility monitors and patches that measure abnormal heart rhythms are all part of the emerging and amazing mobile medical IoT.
- In population health settings, Creo Wellness uses mobile engagement strategies to drive corporate wellness programs. Data collected from advanced lab testing generates valuable insight for risk stratification, but it is the participant’s interaction with the mobile-first Creo application rather than reference data that guides participant engagement. The application includes a recommendation engine, akin to what users expect from entertainment platforms like Netflix, to engage participants based on preferences that they demonstrate through use of the app.
According to a recent Gartner report on the Top Ten Strategic Technology Trends for 2016, the most promising technological advances arise at the intersection between the scads of data collected from mobile devices and apps, and new algorithms that allow devices to actually become autonomous actors.
In other words, innovation occurs when organizations develop programs able to collect and analyze the huge data sets generated by mobile data collection in their fields.
The Creo Wellness system provides an excellent example of this ability to turn big data into bigger answers. Contact us to learn more about how to effectively mobilize health engagement strategies.
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Creo was founded by an innovative, cross-disciplinary team of laboratory diagnostic, business finance and healthcare management veterans. Contact us to learn how our advanced blood testing, precision analytics, health coaching and technology build employee plans that are personalized and effective—delivering real health improvements with measurable reductions in long-term health plan costs to employers.
