Mobile communications technologies in health care, known as mHealth, currently are employed worldwide to address various health care challenges. Some of the most exciting and intuitive health care innovations are powered by mobile communications technologies. Text4baby operates as a public-private partnership providing pregnant women and new moms with vital health information in both English and Spanish at no cost, and it recently was expanded to include additional messages alerting new mothers about insurance eligibility through the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
mHealth applications can help patients and health care professionals work together to manage diseases and health conditions. In-home monitoring devices can collect and transmit data to medical professionals and empower patients by helping them play an active role in their own health management. Most notably, this has been successful for diabetes patients who may need a little extra help with medication adherence.
Many new mHealth applications and devices are on the horizon. Some of the ingenious wireless technologies include:
- Wearable bio sensors that can monitor blood pressure or respiratory rates and transmit the data directly to health care professionals;
- Advanced in-home monitoring systems that can allow patients with disabilities to enjoy increased independence and quality of life
- Medicine bottles that remind patients to take their pills.
These mHealth technologies have tremendous potential to solve many health challenges, as well as to eliminate health disparities and barriers to care that exist in many minority communities, including AAs and NHPIs.
Technology access presents another barrier
Unfortunately, these technologies are not without their own challenges. Low-income communities and communities of colour often lack access to the high-speed broadband that supports these life-saving and enhancing technologies. Without a dedicated push to promote the adoption of new technologies in under served communities, many may continue to be denied access to such technologies.
Given that the Internet, and access to it, will play an increasingly vital role in our daily lives going forward, we need to work to ensure that the existing infrastructure is being utilized in smart and efficient ways that will promote continued expansion, growth, and long-term investment. Sensible, modern approaches are needed to encourage investment and access to all Americans.
A recent White Paper released by PWC India painted a bleak picture for the mobile ecosystem in the coming 2-3 years. One feels that in the forthcoming years, mobile value-added services (m-VAS) should lead the growth from the front. Further, the m-VAS content developers should explore innovation opportunity from the service providers, especially for the content for rural India, as the citizens there would need information on health, education, weather, market and various policies and schemes of the government that would benefit them. It would definitely take few years to saturate this eco-system as the content space is very large and diverse, due to language, culture, knowledge-base and other specificities.
Public and private sectors must work together to ensure that these vital technologies do not fail us and to pave the way for new innovations. This issue will require meaningful outreach to diverse and under served communities and providers, as well as creative solutions and pioneering new technologies
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