Mobile healthcare at HIMSS12: Usability, workflow and innovation

With thousands of new apps geared toward healthcare professionals, the proliferation of the mobile clinician is on the rise. New browser-based and mobile healthcare applications – ranging from point-of-care documentation and reference tools to disease management and medication tracking applications – are being released every day. While many of these applications are simply extensions of existing desktop programs, the number of apps designed solely for web browser and mobile platform deployment continues to expand rapidly. And with evolving smartphone and tablet adoption comes the need for technologies that enhance workflow, overcome adoption barriers and promote positive end user experiences.

Several mHealth themes are expected to dominate this year’s HIMSS12 conference and exhibition, scheduled for Feb. 20-24 in Las Vegas. Here are the key themes:

Mobile usability and better user interfaces
In order to truly aid in clinical workflow and increase physician productivity, mobile healthcare apps need to be designed from the ground up with usability in mind. Integration, access, look-and-feel and intuitiveness are important, and many apps have addressed these interface challenges quite well. However, data entry continues to be a barrier to adoption for mobile electronic health records (EHRs) and point-of-care documentation apps — those apps which require a significant amount of manual text data input.

New technologies have been introduced to the market that allow for better data entry. Cloud-based medical speech recognition is one such technology that is supporting usability of these mobile healthcare applications across a wide variety of devices and platforms. As new technology and clinical-focused apps hit the market, usability and well-designed interfaces that support the mobile clinician’s needs, while providing a ubiquitous user experience, will be key to the adoption of apps on mobile and web-based platforms.

Promoting EHR adoption and patient access
As a result of initiatives like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ EHR Incentive Programs (meaningful use), which requires physicians and hospitals to give patients access to their health information, many providers are turning to mobile and web-based solutions to satisfy their technology needs. In fact, a number of EHRs designed specifically for mobile platforms have been introduced in the past year alone. These systems free physicians from the desktop and support a variety of on-the-go workflows. In essence, mirroring desktop functionality in a workflow-driven solution on smartphones and tablets is critical to the success of these new platforms.

All in all, a broad mobile healthcare ecosystem not only helps physicians get through their days faster by providing access to EHR data from anywhere, but also provides a platform for more patient-oriented engagement, which has become instrumental in this new era of personalized healthcare.

Inspiring development and spurring innovation
It’s clear that as clinicians turn to their smartphones for professional tasks, the industry is being pushed to innovate at an ever-increasing rate. App challenges have been around for years in the consumer space, but these friendly competitions have taken off in healthcare as well. From sponsors in the private sector to the federal government, healthcare-focused app developer challenges are spurring innovation across all clinical specialties – including a push to fight obesity through better access to federal information, transforming health data into mobile games that solve health problems and offering mobile clinicians a voice through speech-enabled healthcare apps.

Given the success in the space thus far, the healthcare community will surely reap the benefits of mobile usability and interface enhancements, upticks in physician and patient adoption and other new and innovative advancements in 2012 and beyond.

Jonathon Dreyer is senior manager for mobile solutions marketing at Nuance Healthcare. He is responsible for bringing cloud-based medical speech recognition and clinical language understanding services to a worldwide community of healthcare IT developers and provider organizations. Prior to this, he was responsible for diagnostic imaging solutions at Nuance and headed marketing at Commissure, Inc., a provider of clinical documentation and healthcare communication solutions.