Status – The future of mobile health application
The increasing usage of mobile data and the wide availability of smartphones has created a new market for medical services, focused on direct patient benefits and health prevention. In 2014 the Google Play and iStore mobile application stores, together numbered over 100,000 healthcare applications. This market is expected to grow significantly in the next few years, from $ 2.4 billion in 2013 to $ 26 billion in 2017 according to research2guidance.
Despite this large number of applications, less than 5% enjoy significant financial success. Common to these applications is their ability to monitor, centralise and consolidate medical data into a single repository as well as being tightly integrated with wearable devices.
However, collecting and centralising data is not enough, to fully unlock the value of information collected through mobile devices, it is necessary to integrate it with the existing medical systems such as the HIS/CIS of healthcare providers or the national medical data repositories maintained by public or private insurance providers. Without this integration, collecting fitness data, heart rate information or blood pressure from wearables will remain just a gimmick, with no significant impact on life quality and medical services.
Such integrations are currently hard to accomplish because mobile health apps have a serious lack of standardisation and centralise data in their proprietary repositories. To some degree this is understandable, given that the market is yet to mature and most applications are focused mainly on consumers/patients.
However, it is necessary to change this state of affairs and any professional applications should try to implement healthcare industry standards such as HL7, DICOM and HISA. These standards can help build a bridge between personal health applications and applications designed for better patient treatment and improved medical services. Companies that will manage to combine these features in a single package will undoubtedly lead the next wave of successful mobile healthcare apps.
Star-Storage anticipates this market changes and developed its healthcare application – STATUS accordingly, to be exactly the bridge between consumer grade healthcare applications and professional applications that help doctors and healthcare providers to be more efficient in their daily activities and provide a higher quality of services.
STATUS is the only healthcare application that offers:
– Native integration with professional storage solutions like Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Clinical Repository;
– Packages a professional mobile application that:
- Collects information form wearables;
- Integrates with portable Bluetooth medical devices;
- Provides live data on health parameters;
- Is a tool for professional communication between medical stuff, patients and doctors.
– Centralizes all information and makes it available through HL7 standards to other core medical software solutions (HIS/CIS).