The convergence of mobile technology with an evolving healthcare delivery system will continue to drive the mobile health (mHealth) applications market, which will see revenues grow from $230 million in 2010 to $392 million in 2015, according to research from Frost & Sullivan.
1. Mobile Health Apps Market Poised For Takeoff
Report says mobile health applications will continue to grow as physicians, patients, and health plans
use technology to address changes in healthcare delivery.
The convergence of mobile technology with an evolving healthcare delivery system will continue to
drive the mobile health (mHealth) applications market, which will see revenues grow from $230 million
in 2010 to $392 million in 2015, according to research from Frost & Sullivan.
According to the report--Analysis of the U.S. Broadband mHealth Applications Market--in the near term,
the mobile health app market will benefit from an increasing number of consumers who will purchase
smartphones and tablets and download easily accessible and affordable health apps. To prove the point,
the study projects there will be 82 million tablet users by 2015, up from 10 million in 2010.
Among those projected to download and use mobile health apps more frequently over the next few
years are older Americans and their caregivers and patients with chronic conditions. The study notes
that as the healthcare industry seeks to reduce costs, mobile health apps will become more prevalent.
The aim of these tools is to better monitor patients’ health and prevent costly events such as hospital
readmissions.
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Support Programs.]
Furthermore, in a consumer-driven patient-centered healthcare model, patients are encouraged to play
a greater role in tracking their health through mobile health apps that monitor vital information such as
medication adherence, blood pressure, and glucose readings.
"The most surprising research finding is the significant growth already seen in this market and the
willingness for consumers to fit the bill," Zachary Bujnoch, senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan,
told InformationWeek Healthcare. "This is unexpected due to the very low awareness and presence of
mind consumers have concerning mHealth products; the value is there but it currently is rarely properly
shown to the consumer."
The report noted that the market is still in the very early stages of development and there are significant
challenges ahead for developers, namely new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations and
oversight that might stall innovation. However, the upside to FDA involvement in the market could be to
ferret out trivial health apps that make unwarranted medical claims.
"While the increases in FDA regulation will stifle some innovation, it will be a benefit to the market as a
whole to vet out the many minimal value mHealth apps present," Bujnoch observed.
Other challenges facing the growth of the mobile health app market are security and privacy concerns.
"Although every industry that deals with electronic information is vulnerable to data breach or misuse
(i.e., by financial institutions, government, or social networks), the realm of health information is so
2. fraught with emotion and liability that the effects of security gone awry are all the more upsetting and
may restrain wider mHealth adoption," the report stated.
Still, the general consensus is that the market will grow, with payers and providers having the most to
gain from the deployment of mobile health apps and the data these apps will manage. "The formidable
technical challenges are to link large IT systems--electronic health records (EHRs), health information
exchanges (HIEs), and payer databases--with what are now discrete software products, and to generate
meaningful analytics," the report said. "The primary marketing challenge will be acquiring the time,
talent, and resources required to familiarize consumers with mHealth apps and the concept of self-
health to get a user base that justifies expenses."
When are emerging technologies ready for clinical use? In the new issue of InformationWeek Healthcare,
find out how three promising innovations--personalized medicine, clinical analytics, and natural
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Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/mobile-wireless/232400467
This is what we feel:
The revolution that’s currently witnessed within the arena of the combined space of smart phone apps
and modern healthcare is just the tip of the iceberg. Acroseas the makers behind Orra Health believe
that the newer revelations will see the adoption-level shifts in terms of the demographics and
psychographics. This coupled with the growth in the hardware markets of tablets and smart phones, will
make this space a very crowded, yet a value driven one.