Mobile Apps in Healthcare Poised to Grow Steeply, Pathology Groups and Clinical Laboratories to Benefit

By Meenakshi Shankar

TMCnet Contributor

 

Mobile Apps in Healthcare Poised to Grow Steeply; Pathology Groups and Clinical Laboratories to Benefit

The worldwide mobile healthcare market in 2011 was around $1.2 billion. By 2018, it is poised to hit $11.8 billion as per New York-based market research firm, GlobalData. Experts predict a steep climb in the adoption rate of mHealth applications during the next 36 months, and have indicated that this market will evolve into a distinct and primary information channel that will play a significant role in clinical care.

But the fact is that clinicians use roughly 30 percent of currently-available healthcare apps to access or analyze patient information. Yet some challenges have risen and "the main barriers are not the technology," stated David Levy, M.D., Global Leader for Healthcare at PwC.

Instead, he declared, they come from the healthcare industry's "inherent resistance to change."

Levy observed that mHealth is more than just an add-on to the healthcare industry. "We see it as the future of healthcare, deeply integrated into delivery that will be better, faster, less expensive and far more customer-focused," he stated.

For clinical laboratories and pathology groups that want to offer state-of-the-art informatics solutions to their physician clients, it will be necessary to have an informatics strategy to include mHealth applications that deliver value to clinicians.

"Mobile is a technology that winds its way through everything we're doing and we're planning to do. It is a channel to deliver content and a great way for us to collect more real-time information and connect physicians and patients with each other," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, in a recent story published in Modern Healthcare (MH).

mHealth trend reinforces the dominant role that feature-rich informatics will play in allowing providers, including pathology groups and clinical laboratories, to deliver added value to physicians, patients and payers.

Consequently, every clinical laboratory organization should be looking at this trend and developing its own mHealth-based strategy.