Mobile Health

The Positive Impact of mHealth on Patient Care

The advent of mobile health on patient care will improve patient outcomes, increase patient compliance and empower patients to take responsibility for their healthcare management and decisions. While some obstacles are present in this new information age, the outcomes can be positive when supported and facilitated by nursing informatics specialists.

The impact on the provider using mobile healthcare. For the provider, a patient who accesses information through a mobile device or the internet is a patient who is more informed about their own health or disease process, thus creating greater patient satisfaction. This assists the provider by decreasing the amount of basic information needing to be provided, while being able to elevate the patient’s knowledge into a shared wisdom (DIKW) framework (Gee et al., 2012). With patients who are able to upload daily information to the provider via mobile application, the provider is able to make more informed, holistic self-care decisions about the patient’s treatment plan and options because the data does not exist in a vacuum without context (Gee et al., 2012).

According to Kimmel (2012), mHealth will allow much more time to be spent developing actionable results instead of gathering data. This allows more focus on the individual patient, adaptation to the patient’s lifestyle and real-time reports (Kimmel, 2012).

Challenges of using mHealth in the articles chosen. The challenges of this type of technology include helping the patient identify quality resources to reference and how best to utilize these resources, as well as an increase in time needed to spend with patients due to the complexity of questions prompted by internet information (Gee et al., 2012). Resistance is often met within institutions when attempting to move from data-driven nursing to knowledge-driven nursing (Kimmel, 2012).

References

Gee, P., Greenwood, D., Kim, K., Perez, S., Staggers, N., & DeVon, H. (2012). Exploration of the e-patient phenomenon in nursing informatics. Nursing Outlook, 60, E9-E16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2011.11.005

Kimmel, K. (2012, May). Shifting gears: guiding your facility to knowledge-driven nursing. Nursing Management, 21-23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/01.NUMA.0000413651.80589.18