Health IT, Hospitals

4 unexpected mobile health findings from physicians, payers and patients

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers exploring the opportunities for using mobile health and the potential barriers […]

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers exploring the opportunities for using mobile health and the potential barriers for its growth challenges some assumptions made about how physicians, payers and patients are thinking about this area, such as how it is perceived by young physicians and how physicians would like it to be used.

Young physicians are worried about how patients use it. Although about 44 percent of the 433 physicians surveyed are “worried” about mobile health making patients more independent, the majority of young physicians — those with five years of experience or less, or 53 percent, feel this way. And 24 percent of these young doctors discourage their patients from using mobile health. It’s tough to say why, and the report’s authors don’t shed much light other than speculating that their junior positions may lead them to be more impacted by disruption, like fewer jobs.

Payers would like patients to provide more data to physicians and so would physicians. About 40 percent of the 345 payer participants said they would like their members to use mobile devices to provide more data to physicians, a finding that jibes with something physicians want. About 51 percent of doctors would like to receive data to monitor patients and another 51 percent say they would like to use it to provide instructions on drug adherence and other health-related communication. Approximately 48 percent would like to use it as an explanatory or demonstration tool for patients during office visits.

Reimbursement priorities. About 70 percent of payers plan to pay for mobile access to EMR in the next three years; only 55 percent of physicians plan to offer this service. About 71 percent of physicians plan to use mobile health for telephone consultations and 73 percent of physicians said they would use it for remote patient monitoring. A surprising 65 percent of payers would reimburse text-based consulting which, surprisingly or not, 44 percent of physicians would want to offer.

Technology regulation gap.  Many payers and physicians, 45 percent, believe regulation created for older technologies will not translate well to newer technologies, i.e., mobile health, and that’s a significant challenge for mobile health adoption. Bakul Patel, a policy adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration acknowledged the challenge of balancing patient  safety with some benefits that mobile health can offer, according to the report.

“There is a lot more work in terms of how regulators can add value to this ecosystem. As part of that effort we are developing a new framework for the small subset of high risk mHealth devices that will be able to accommodate the rapid innovation cycles of these technologies.”

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