Healthcare Professionals Most Threatened Traditional Healthcare Player By mHealth

Patients stand to benefit the most from developments in mHealth over the next five years, but changes to traditional patient pathways mean that the Healthcare professional’s core business is the most at risk of all traditional healthcare providers.

The mHealth Economics 2016 Report is out.
Download the report for free!

Despite the millions of downloads, sensors shipments and media hype, mHealth has only recently begun to actively change the way that healthcare can be delivered. Amongst all stakeholders in the industry, mHealth apps stand to benefit patients most. Drawing upon our annual Global mHealth App Developer Economics Survey for 2015, the largest study of its kind, we discovered that more than 50% of market experts project a high positive impact on how patients manage their health conditions and wellbeing as a result of advances in mHealth. As a result, mHealth is seen to have a large impact on all other phases of the patient journey: prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Most importantly, developments in mHealth will have a particularly acute impact upon the relationship between patients and health care professionals.

41% of mHealth app experts foresee that mHealth will have a large impact upon how providers, such as doctors and nurses treat patients, schedule appointments and execute diagnostics. Providers, are seen as the industry group, most ‘at risk’ from developments in mHealth solutions. One participant in our survey commented, “once you are diagnosed with a treatable and controllable illness, mHealth Apps will allow people to free themselves from physicians.”

With the number of double examinations reduced because of patients storing previous test results on EHR apps, or patients making fewer hospital visits due to remote diagnostics, coupled with the ubiquity of healthcare information with apps granting access to e.g. disease, medication or doctor’s information everywhere and every time, we can see indications of why experts see mHealth practitioners as particularly at risk.

Med Tech companies are also seen as at risk, with new technologies leading to new competition in the market. In the case of mHealth, there is great hope that the cost of solutions will decrease dramatically in the next 5 years thus threatening existing patient management or diagnostic system providers.

The Pharma industry is seen to be at risk predominantly because of their potential to lose a key competitive advantage: knowledge about patients. New mHealth service providers already gather more patient information with the help of apps than any clinical trial is able to provide. The leading diabetes management app providers will for example know how diabetes progresses for hundreds of thousands of patients in correlation with their activity level, what they have eaten, their mood or because of the medication they have taken. Whilst Pharma companies have already begun to counter this risk, this has been with limited success thus far. Read our “Pharma App Benchmarking 2014” report to learn more about the current mHealth app activities of the 12 leading Pharma companies.

Other groups will be less impacted by mHealth during the next five years with pharmacies being the industry with the lowest share of high impact forecast. 23% of mHealth market players actually anticipate that the impact mHealth upon Pharmacy industry will be none or very little.

Aside from Pharmacies, mHealth is foreseen to have a major impact on all other relevant healthcare stakeholders by the majority of today’s mHealth market players.

To read more about this topic, please download our free report, the mHealth App Developer Economics Survey 2015 from our website.

We welcome your feedback and actively encourage you to participate in this years’ App Developer Economics Survey which will launch in February 2016.