Juwen's Final Blog Post

Introduction

Throughout the semester, one of the major challenges of today’s healthcare industry that we have discussed so far is the soaring cost for delivering the healthcare services. The original motivation to investigate the role of mobile applications in the future development of healthcare was attributed to the characteristics of telemedicine technology, such as, the flexibility, instantaneous ability, and possible economic benefits of being adapted with mHealth (mobile health). Our project started with the analysis of three telemedicine applications and the comparison of their usability, which pretty much being covered in Kathryn’s part. As we are interested in the future development and considerations of telemedicine, my part will be more concentrate on the future trends of it as well as the potential challenges. The fundamental approach that I used to gather my preliminary data was the related research paper from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In my final blog post, you can expect to see the summary of economic benefits that mHealth would give rise to both developing and developed countries, and my thoughts on the implications of the project.

Healthcare Background

In this short section, I will give a fundamental background of healthcare in both developing country and developed country and how might telemedicine will affect the current scenario. In developed countries, though the healthcare topic is very controversial in the U.S. and the debates around it has been shifted from the ObamaCare to TrumpCare, most of the developed countries provide insurance for their citizens and cost for healthcare services is affordable and reasonable such as in German and Japan. Both public and private healthcare providers are very optimistic to telemedicine and the transition towards the technology into application is very fast.

The scenario in developing countries does not present as good as those developed countries. For example, in China, the government has not developed a mature system and regulations on healthcare insurance, and due to the variants of population density, where population density is much higher in big cities, patients in China are less likely to get immediate healthcare services. Furthermore, the rate of literacy is much lower than in those developed countries so that the introductory education on healthcare is also needed.

During my research, I was not surprised by the unbalancing allocation of the healthcare resource in those developing countries, and the reason behind the scenarios may either be the huge population such as China and India or the low rate of literacy. However, what really impressed me is fast growing of internet users, which also can be a reflection of smartphone users.

The statistics data from World Bank showed that the internet users in China has reached a 50.3% of the total population, but what is more impressive is the rate of increase in internet users that both China and India showed are optimistic when I consider the future trends of telemedicine in those developing countries. Therefore, it is reasonable for us to have a very positive prospect when talking about the future of telemedicine in those countries.

The Economic Benefits

We already saw one possible solution to the inadequate healthcare in developing countries is to use communication technologies for healthcare. The development of voice recognition, virtual/augmented reality, and artificial intelligence is providing better performance and usability of telemedicine applications. Some of the examples can be drawn upon other classmates’ presentation, such as healthcare surveillance can be synchronized via wearable devices and more efficient treatment from analytical outcomes. All of those technologies would add more credits on the performance, flexibility, and reliability on the use of telemedicine.

Furthermore, one particular benefit that I can see through those developments is from the economic aspect. From the research paper that particularly focusing on the economic benefits of mobile application wrote by Doctor Powell, he pointed out that both direct and indirect benefits in economics are generating from the use of app. For the purpose of referencing, I have attached a source table below.

In particular with the functionality that mobile application can performed such as, healthcare information collecting, instance video/audio interaction with healthcare providers, and appropriate guidance on basic symptoms give patients a shortcut to “doctors”, which definitely save time costs and the actual economic costs.

Future Considerations

As I have addressed some possible challenges from both information security and government regulations during the final presentation. I was not so clear about how more people will take the advantage of using mobile applications versus the concern about privacy and security. According to the study constructed by ITOnline in 2015, about two thirds of Americans would use a mobile app to manage health-related issues. Top downloads sorted by categories are:

• Tracking diet/nutrition (47 percent)
• Medication reminders (46 percent)
• Tracking symptoms (45 percent)
• Tracking physical activity (44 percent)

Improved integrated biometric authentication methods, such as finger prints, facial recognition or even the most recent retina technology would provide more secure accessing to your smartphone and healthcare data stored in mobile platforms.

In accordance with my current project stage, and the data that I have collected, I think telemedicine broadens the opportunity for patients to have access in healthcare services or communicate with doctors which maybe hardly to happen in developing country. Besides some advantages from functionalities’ aspect (For details please refer on Kathryn’s post), telemedicine also adds credits on the economics benefits either direct or indirect. In the future, I believe the debate around privacy and security would remain controversial and will still be an issue for most of the time, but with more secure methods or encryption that we have discussed so far, I do keep a very positive prospect for the future of telemedicine.