Modern Health Care Apps To Reduce Readmissions In Hospitals

Addressing to various shortcomings in healthcare delivery, mobile technology to impact outcomes in chronic disease management, care coordination and population health. Mobile health applications like Text4baby can give patients extremely easy access to health information, as in like health messages to pregnant women, or women with an infant less than one year old.

The mobile health market reached over $718 million in the United States alone which means beneficial applications already created and in use by the healthcare industry. So, what’s now?

The Problem of Readmissions

One of the widely tapped areas in mobile health market is the widespread issue of preventable readmissions. Not only that it cost so high but with new CMS regulations like the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program and the proposed Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program- hospitals are facing a lot of issues. It is believed that high levels of preventable readmission rates could lose a portion of federal payments. On the other hand, many patients miss what is communicated during the discharge process the likelihood of mistakes increases.

How Mobile Apps Can Be a Potential Solution

Smartphones like Android and the iPhone have mobile-based applications that offer providers and patients a method for accessing and sharing health information. More than 17,000 mobile health applications in major app stores can capture treatment instructions and build a HIPAA-compliant personal website where the instructions are easily accessible by the patient.

How the app works

The app works with a camera on the smartphone or tablet to record a provider giving instructions to the patient. Post the recording, all that the user will need to do is to press a button to upload the content and publish the video or audio recording through the mobile app. The provider can even add additional resources and treatment information later on. Currently, there are many mobile health applications use the same techniques to meet HIPAA regulations.

As a bottom line, mobile health can help reduce readmissions, manage chronic diseases and improve accessibility of health information benefitting both providers and patients to become more accountable for health outcomes.