Abstract
The World Health Organization in its recent statement has highlighted the potential of the evolving field of E-Health (1). It defines E-health as the process in which health resources and health care are being communicated and transferred by electronic medium (1). It states explicitly that with the implementation of E-health, it is to be expected that there will be more efficient usage of healthcare resources in the future. Indeed, there has been major advances in the technological field over the past decade, especially so, with the introduction of Smartphone and their associated applications. Smartphones represent a new modality of technology that offers more than what conventional mobile technology could offer. Given that they are equipped with tremendous computing power, they now allow individuals and healthcare workers to access not only information but also work on the go. The authors acknowledge that E-health also encompasses other modalities of technologies, such as telephone-delivered therapy, virtual reality, and text messaging technology. In this manuscript, we will focus mainly on the smartphone aspect of E-health.
Highlights
The World Health Organization in its recent statement has highlighted the potential of the evolving field of E-Health [1]
A review of the existing published literature revealed that in psychiatry, E-Health for Psychiatrists these technologies advances have been utilized in several areas, such as the application of text-messaging services in reinforcing the medication compliance for schizophrenic patients [6], and the usage of smartphone-based software to facilitate selfreporting of symptoms in schizophrenia patients [7]
The authors of the current paper do concur and acknowledge that these are crucial issues that need to be addressed first, prior to there being further utilization of technology for future advances in this field. It is the aim of the authors, to make use of this paper to address one of the main and core issues pertaining to the lack of evidence base with regards to existing published mobile applications and illustrate how psychiatrists could make use of simple methodologies to tap onto advances in this field, but yet ensure the evidence base of the products created, whether for education, research, or patient care
Summary
The adoption of technology by healthcare professionals is not something new, as a previous systematic review [2] has highlighted that healthcare professionals are more receptive toward technology. The authors of the current paper do concur and acknowledge that these are crucial issues that need to be addressed first, prior to there being further utilization of technology for future advances in this field It is the aim of the authors, to make use of this paper to address one of the main and core issues pertaining to the lack of evidence base with regards to existing published mobile applications and illustrate how psychiatrists could make use of simple methodologies to tap onto advances in this field, but yet ensure the evidence base of the products created, whether for education, research, or patient care. Five core areas of an application could be evaluated by the scale, which ranged from that of engagement, functionality, esthetics, information quality, and a subjective quality scale [15] The development of such scales would greatly help psychiatrists in determining the evidence base pertaining to existing applications. Through the introduction of these scales, the authors hope that healthcare professionals could appreciate that there are methods that could be used to determine whether an application is evidence based or not
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