Leading researchers and practitioners identify the best practices in using mobile technologies to promote healthy behaviours and reduce unhealthy ones, placing a special focus on developing countries.

The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the achievement of health objectives (mHealth) has the potential to transform the face of health service delivery across the globe. A powerful combination of factors is driving this change. These include rapid advances in mobile technologies and applications, a rise in new opportunities for the integration of mobile health into existing eHealth services, and the continued growth in coverage of mobile cellular networks. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there are now over 5 billion wireless subscribers; over 70% of them reside in low- and middle-income countries. For the first time the World Health Organization's Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) has sought to determine the status of mHealth in Member States; its 2009 global survey contained a section specifically devoted to mHealth. Completed by 114 Member States, the survey documented for analysis four aspects of mHealth: adoption of initiatives, types of initiatives, status of evaluation, and barriers to implementation. Fourteen categories of mHealth services were surveyed: health call centres, emergency toll-free telephone services, managing emergencies and disasters, mobile telemedicine, appointment reminders, community mobilization and health promotion, treatment compliance, mobile patient records, information access, patient monitoring, health surveys and data collection, surveillance, health awareness raising, and decision support systems.

This book provides a practically applicable guide to designing evidence-based medical apps and mHealth interventions. It features detailed guidance and case studies where applicable on the best practices and available techniques from both technological (platform technologies, toolkits, sensors) and research perspectives. This approach enables the reader to develop a deep understanding of how to collect the appropriate data and work with users to build a user friendly app for their target audience. Information on how researchers and designers can communicate their intentions with a variety of stakeholders including medical practitioners, developers and researchers to ensure the best possible decisions are made during the development process to produce an app of optimal quality that also considers usability. Developing Medical Apps and mHealth Interventions comprehensively covers the development of medical and health apps for researchers, informaticians and physicians, and is a valuable resource for the experienced professional and trainee seeking a text on how to develop user friendly medical apps.

This book explains how telemedicine can offer solutions capable of improving the care and survival rates of cancer patients and can also help patients to live a normal life in spite of their condition. Different fields of application – community, hospital and home based – are examined, and detailed attention is paid to the use of tele-oncology in rural/extreme rural settings and in developing countries. The impact of new technologies and the opportunities afforded by the social web are both discussed. The concluding chapters consider eLearning in relation to cancer care and assess the scope for education to improve prevention. No medical condition can shatter people’s lives as cancer does today and the need to develop strategies to reduce the disease burden and improve quality of life is paramount. Readers will find this new volume in Springer’s TELe Health series to be a rich source of information on the important contribution that can be made by telemedicine in achieving these goals.

The editors of the HIMSS Books' best-seller mHealth: From Smartphones to Smart Systems (603) have returned to deliver an expansive survey of the initiatives, innovators, and technologies driving the patient-centered mobile healthcare revolution. mHealth Innovation: Best Practices from the Mobile Frontier explores the promise of mHealth as a balance between emerging technologies and process innovations leading to improved outcomes-with the ultimate aim of creating a patient-centered and consumer-driven healthcare ecosystem. Examining the rapidly changing mobile healthcare environment from myriad perspectives, the book includes a comprehensive survey of the current-state ecosystem-app development, interoperability, security, standards, organizational and governmental policy, innovation, next-generation solutions, and mBusiness-and 20 results-driven, world-spanning case studies covering behavior change, patient engagement, patient-provider decision making, mobile gaming, mobile prescription therapy, home monitoring, mobile-to-mobile online delivery, access to care, app certification and quality evaluations, mixed media campaigns, and much more.

In 1996, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report Telemedicine: A Guide to Assessing Telecommunications for Health Care. In that report, the IOM Committee on Evaluating Clinical Applications of Telemedicine found telemedicine is similar in most respects to other technologies for which better evidence of effectiveness is also being demanded. Telemedicine, however, has some special characteristics-shared with information technologies generally-that warrant particular notice from evaluators and decision makers. Since that time, attention to telehealth has continued to grow in both the public and private sectors. Peer-reviewed journals and professional societies are devoted to telehealth, the federal government provides grant funding to promote the use of telehealth, and the private technology industry continues to develop new applications for telehealth. However, barriers remain to the use of telehealth modalities, including issues related to reimbursement, licensure, workforce, and costs. Also, some areas of telehealth have developed a stronger evidence base than others. The Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) sponsored the IOM in holding a workshop in Washington, DC, on August 8-9 2012, to examine how the use of telehealth technology can fit into the U.S. health care system. HRSA asked the IOM to focus on the potential for telehealth to serve geographically isolated individuals and extend the reach of scarce resources while also emphasizing the quality and value in the delivery of health care services. This workshop summary discusses the evolution of telehealth since 1996, including the increasing role of the private sector, policies that have promoted or delayed the use of telehealth, and consumer acceptance of telehealth. The Role of Telehealth in an Evolving Health Care Environment: Workshop Summary discusses the current evidence base for telehealth, including available data and gaps in data; discuss how technological developments, including mobile telehealth, electronic intensive care units, remote monitoring, social networking, and wearable devices, in conjunction with the push for electronic health records, is changing the delivery of health care in rural and urban environments. This report also summarizes actions that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can undertake to further the use of telehealth to improve health care outcomes while controlling costs in the current health care environment.

This book defines the phenomenon of mHealth and its evolution, explaining why an understanding of mHealth is critical for decision makers, entrepreneurs and policy analysts who are pivotal to developing products that meet the collaborative health information needs of consumers and providers in a competitive and rapidly-changing environment. The book examines trends in mHealth and discusses how mHealth technologies offer opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, those who often are industry first-movers with regard to technology advancement. It also explores the changing dynamics and relationships among physicians, patients, insurers, regulators, managers, administrators, caregivers and others involved in the delivery of health services. The primary focus is on the ways in which mHealth technologies are revising and reshaping healthcare delivery systems in the United States and globally and how those changes are expected to change the ways in which the business of healthcare is conducted. mHealth: Transforming Healthcare consists of nine chapters that addresses key content areas, including history (to the extent that dynamic technologies have a history), projection of immediate evolution and consistent issues associated with health technology, such as security and information privacy and government and industry regulation. A major point of discussion addressed is whether mHealth is a transient group of products and a passing patient encounter approach, or if it is the way much of our health care will be delivered in future years with incremental evolution to achieve sustainable innovation of health technologies.