Manage My Condition: A Standard Framework for the Development of Cloud-Based Medical Condition Management Applications

Abstract

Given the increasing availability and accessibility of mobile devices, there is enormous potential to transform how healthcare is administered through the creation of highly customized smartphone-based applications for effective medical condition management. Such platforms can offer improvements for both patients and healthcare systems. For patients, advantages include improved health management as well as satisfaction, enabling them to better understand their medical condition and improve their compliance with medication regimes. For healthcare systems, advantages include more effective patient management and increased pay-for-performance reimbursements, enabling real time tracking of critical patient specific data to provide comprehensive, effective medical condition management. However, a critical barrier to achieving these tantalizing benefits in healthcare management is the current paradigm of medical software design. Development and deployment of enterprise-wide applications is generally slow and expensive. Furthermore, each application is developed independently, even if several functionalities overlap between different applications. In this paper, we present ManageMyCondition, a framework for the rapid creation and standardization of medical condition management applications. The framework defines different building blocks for the creation of cloud-based mobile applications, defines a common format for data acquisition and presentation, and is easily customizable and extendable to meet the needs of different medical conditions. Finally, we present three mobile applications for medical condition management developed using the ManageMyCondition framework.