Most Effective Mobile Health App For Your E-Health Practice

Mobile Health Apps

E-health or mobile health is no longer in its infancy and is now a highly popular, convenient way for patients worldwide to access vital medical care. If you’re a practitioner, you might already be familiar with a few of its benefits – but not yet have the practical understanding of how to make it happen.

In this article, we’ll show you how to take your practice digital when you make a mobile health app, or e-health app, part of your business model.

Before you get started, we recommend our $1 trial of Quenza’s mobile health app for your practice. Our blended care software will help you deliver smoother, more enjoyable patient journeys online, and contains all the tools you need to run your professional e-clinic or teletherapy from any connected device.

What is Mobile Health or E-Health?

E-health, or mobile health, is the nexus of public health and medical technologies – an advanced, convenient way for more people to benefit from professional healthcare solutions through virtual media and channels.

In broader terms, the phrase encompasses a variety of online services and treatments that are provided through digital means.

This covers a huge scope of healthcare solutions, a few examples of which might include:

  • Teletherapy for mental health, e.g. iCBT or online group therapy
  • Medical checkups delivered through videoconferencing
  • Monitoring health indicators through remote tracking devices, e.g. glucose monitors or fitness trackers
  • Online physical therapy, speech therapy, or applied behavior analysis programs, and
  • Routine GP consultations through voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) and instant messaging.

How Is E-Health Revolutionizing Healthcare

Mobile health apps represent a commitment to networked, global thinking, to improve healthcare by using information and communication technology.

Mobile health has a huge range of advantages and has been described as:[1]

A state-of-mind, a way of thinking, an attitude, and a commitment for networked, global thinking, to improve health care locally, regionally, and worldwide by using information and communication technology.

As Eysenbach argues, its impacts can be cleverly summarized as 10 ‘E’s’; we’ve described their transformative impact on global healthcare in the table below.[1]

E-Health Impact

Description/Example

Efficiency

  • E-health often improves healthcare efficiency, reducing costs
  • E.g. By enhancing provider communication to avoid unnecessary repeat diagnoses or treatment

Enhanced Quality

  • Mobile health can improve treatment quality
  • E.g. By involving consumers for quality assurance, or by directing them to the best quality healthcare providers

Evidence-based Treatment

  • Professional mobile healthcare involves scientifically validated treatment and processes
  • E.g. Rigorous scientific evaluation is required for mobile health apps under the Stepped Care IAPT initiative

Empowering

  • E-health informs, educates, and empowers patients by making the medical and treatment information more widely available
  • E.g. Providers can access their patients’ electronic health records, and patients can view scientific evidence on treatments for informed decision-making

Encouraging

  • Internet-based healthcare encourages more two-way patient-provider relationships for collaborative treatment planning
  • E.g. Mobile health apps improve communication between face-to-face appointments

Educational

  • Both practitioners and patients have access to more healthcare information with mobile health
  • E.g. Continuing medical education opportunities for providers online
  • E.g. Digital psychoeducation for patients, or tailored preventive information for consumers

Enabling

  • E-health facilitates knowledge sharing between providers, and between providers and patients
  • E.g. Encouraging standardized communication between healthcare establishments

Extensive/Expansive

  • Mobile health reaches consumers in more geographical areas, and also makes a wider scope of services more available
  • E.g. Remotely dispersed patients can access specialized treatment online where a provider is not available in their area

Ethical

  • E-health embraces new, more transparent methods of patient-physician interaction
  • E.g. Online psychiatry and teletherapy require informed consent and HIPAA-compliant practice

Equitable

  • While challenges still remain, mobile health makes healthcare more affordable and accessible to more patient populations
  • E.g. Mobile health apps are more accessible to mobility challenged groups, and teletherapy is more affordable for underserved demographics

5+ Proven Benefits of Mobile Health Apps

We know that mobile health can be hugely beneficial when it’s delivered professionally, but what does that mean for providers?

As a teletherapist, digital psychiatrist, or online GP, embracing e-health in a practical sense means adapting your services to digital channels.

It may sound like a lot of new learning, but typically comes down to a few simple changes such as:

  • Conducting your sessions online, e.g. through videoconferencing, audio chats, or instant messaging
  • Communicating digitally with your clients between sessions – often using the same channels
  • Sharing patient health information virtually, through online activities, e-courses, and multimedia, and
  • Collecting and tracking health-related data digitally, which is easily (and automatically) achieved with professional mobile health apps like Quenza.

Many healthcare professionals use all-in-one mobile health apps to deliver professional mental health solutions online under their own practice brand.

These tailor-made solutions are designed to streamline practitioner workflows and maximize the beneficial effects of your science-based treatments, resulting in better patient care and improved health outcomes.

[1]

Some proven benefits of e-health apps include:

  1. Greater reach: Accessing treatment or therapy through an app means remotely-located patients are more likely to seek out healthcare or attend routine appointments.[2]
  2. Patient satisfaction: Mobile health apps are convenient and often interactive, delivering an engaging treatment experience that has been linked to high patient satisfaction.[3]
  3. More affordable treatment: E-health and mental health apps can streamline your practice admin, making them more cost-effective to deliver and affordable for patients.[4]
  4. Enhanced efficiency: Mobile health apps enable patients to attend sessions, book appointments, and begin treatment more efficiently, while also reducing practice paperwork, and simplifying admin for providers, and
  5. Fewer administrative errors: Technology also simplifies data collection for practices, helping practitioners gather and store patient information, assessment results, and more in a HIPAA-compliant manner.[5]

Best Mobile Health App To Download Today

There are many tools and software solutions that can be used to deliver healthcare online, but the ideal app for your services will depend on your practice.

A good mobile health app should provide the tools you need to achieve your core goals – one great example is Quenza’s mobile health app, which we’ll use to illustrate.

A Closer Look

First, the best mobile health app for your practice should help you design and share healthcare treatments, with custom form builders or activity design features.

Quenza’s easy-to-use Activity Builder tool is a great example of a simple-to-use digital feature that helps you build online exercises, assessments, interventions, and other healthcare treatments:

Quenza Activity Builder Mobile Health App
Create unique, personalized healthcare solutions for your patients with Quenza’s drag-and-drop Activity Builder.

As shown, you can simply drag and drop different fields into a blank template to create virtual solutions in a few easy steps with the Activity Builder tool. You can even custom brand your worksheets, lessons, patient resources, and interventions with your practice logo.

With Quenza’s mobile health app, these are delivered as interactive Activities to your patients’ devices as shown below, and they can work through their treatment online.

Quenza Mobile Health App
Quenza’s mobile health app delivers your patients’ treatments privately and securely to any connected device.

If you deliver mental health treatments, as in our example above, all materials are also kept private and secure with Quenza’s HIPAA-compliant platform. They can be downloaded by your patients as PDFs directly from their free client portal on their smartphone or tablet mobile health app.

Your Activity Builder also performs several more key functions that you should be looking for in the best mobile health app, as it can:

  • Simplify your note-taking – by allowing you to create custom therapy, BIRP (Behavior, Intervention, Responde, and Plan), DAP (Data, Assessment,and Plan), and SOAP note templates, and
  • Reduce your administration: when you use it to create patient invoices, intake forms, encounter forms, informed consent documents, and more under your practice brand.

As we’ve also seen, Quenza’s tools help you store patient information securely, another essential feature to look for in an ideal mobile health app. With Quenza, all healthcare records, results, patient data, and chat logs are encrypted, so that you can deliver treatment in a way that’s GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant.

The best mobile health app should also streamline treatment planning so that you as a provider have more time to spend with clients.

This is easily achieved with Quenza’s Pathways tool, another example of how tools in specially designed e-health apps can help you craft efficient, effective care pathways digitally:

Quenza Pathways Tool Ehealth App
Quenza’s Pathways Tool is ideal for crafting personalized, digital treatment plans for your reference, or for sharing with other providers through the HIPAA-compliant e-health app.

You can organize different Activities as steps to design a personalized care pathway for patients with your Pathways Tool, which will also deliver each element according to your specified treatment schedule.

Another tool that Quenza makes a great e-health app is that it enables more convenient, more frequent Client communication.

As shown here, you can use HIPAA-compliant instant messaging for between-session communications, such as when you’d like to remind patients of an appointment or to complete an Activity:

Quenza Chat E-health App
Quenza Chat gives you convenient access to clients between sessions with HIPAA-compliant, in-app instant messaging.

While keeping your correspondence secure and readily accessible on your connected device, Quenza Chat also centralizes your client communications. You can opt in or out of notifications on a per-patient basis, or turn all your chat notifications off entirely when your practice is out of hours.

How To Use Quenza’s Tools For Helping Patients

There are a wealth of ways to use Quenza’s tools to simplify your practice workflow and deliver more efficient, engaging patient treatments.

In addition to transforming your current in-person treatments into digital forms, you might also consider:

Because it’s designed specifically for telehealth and blended care practice, you’ll find Quenza’s tools help you stay in touch, organized, and on top of your patients’ welfare, so that you can maximize their chances of success.

Final Thoughts

If your practice hopes to help more clients, more effectively, an all-in-one e-health app is the best way to take your solutions digital.

With a little time spent mastering some basic tools, you’ll very soon have all your existing treatments available online, and designing new ones of your very own.

We hope this guide was helpful. To share unique, professional wellbeing treatments of your own, don’t forget to start your 30-day, $1 trial of Quenza’s mobile health app. Quenza’s user-friendly online tools include everything you need to elevate your patient experience so that you can help more patients, even more effectively with your own online solutions.

References

  1. ^ Eysenbach, G. (2001). What is e-health?. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 3(2), e20.
  2. ^ Goodridge, D., & Marciniuk, D. (2016). Rural and remote care: overcoming the challenges of distance. Chronic Respiratory Disease, 13(2), 192.
  3. ^ Polinski, J. M., Barker, T., Gagliano, N., Sussman, A., Brennan, T. A., & Shrank, W. H. (2016). Patients’ satisfaction with and preference for telehealth visits. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 31(3), 269.
  4. ^ McLean, S., Sheikh, A., Cresswell, K., Nurmatov, U., Mukherjee, M., Hemmi, A., & Pagliari, C. (2013). The impact of telehealthcare on the quality and safety of care: a systematic overview. PloS one, 8(8), e71238.
  5. ^ Institute of Medicine. (2003). Key capabilities of an electronic health record system. Retrieved from http://iom.nationalacademies.org/Reports/2003/Key-Capabilities-of-anElectronic-Health-Record-System.aspx

About the author

Catherine specializes in Organizational and Positive Psychology, helping entrepreneurs, clinical psychologists and OD specialists grow their businesses by simplifying their digital journeys.

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