Abstract
Mobile health (m-health) is one of the recently introduced tools for patient education and disease management. M-health was first introduced and defined in 2003 as “mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies for healthcare [1].” Since then, the uptake of m-health solutions has been fast. Arecent WHO report ‘M-health-new horizons for health through mobile technologies’ [2], published in 2011, outlined the results of a worldwide survey of m-health uptake revealing that 83% of all member states offer at least one type of m-health service [2]. Amongst the most common services was mobile telemedicine. The latter has been proven to improve patient outcomes in many diseases such as diabetes, HIV, CHF and COPD [2].
Highlights
Mobile health (m-health) is one of the recently introduced tools for patient education and disease management
Patients who were reminded of the need to take their antiviral medication at the correct time had shown a 12% rise in adherence, when compared with the control group (p-value=0.006), both at 6 and 12 months after the trial [5]
A year later, this resulted in a 9% increase in the number of patients in the intervention group achieving sufficient plasma HIV-1 RNA load inhibition compared to the control group (p-value=0.04) [5]
Summary
Mobile health (m-health) is one of the recently introduced tools for patient education and disease management. The use of smartphone applications can help address these issues whereby all the information is provided in one resource in a patient friendly format that is available anytime and anywhere Such digital interventions can provide notification reminders for taking the anti-cancer drugs; provide decision-taking support to assist patients in managing adverse events safely with the added possibility of communication with a healthcare professional in real time offering the patient with virtual support. All these features were desirable by patients based on the themes identified in our study [6,7,8]. Our study along with other trials have shown that patients find this important since it can bestow care and support for patients by sharing information about their illness [9]
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