Mobile Applications in Healthcare: Reaching Out to Patients to Improve Care
by Colin Konschak, MBA, FHIMSS and Ram Davaloor, MS, MBA
One in five mobile phone owners today owns a smartphone, a trend that is on the rise as consumers increasingly use these devices as handheld computers. Not surprisingly the number of consumer smartphone applications (apps) that were downloaded went from 300 million in 2009 to five billion in 2010. With mobile devices outnumbering personal computers, we are approaching the point where they will be the most common way to access data.
For healthcare, the explosion of the smartphone market is an unprecedented opportunity. More than 200 million mobile health (mHealth) applications are in use today, and that number is expected to increase threefold by 2012.
