Updated June 08, 2015.

One of the most exciting, emerging fields in healthcare today is Mobile Health Technology, sometimes called "mHealth" or "Connected Health". The healthcare delivery system faces massive financial challenges. While technology, research, discovery, and medical experience and training have all improved the quality and efficacy of care available to patients today, it has also made that care more expensive to deliver.

Mobile Health Technology innovators are trying to change that trend. They are trying to continue technology's improvement in care, but they are now finding ways to use the advantages that technology can provide to in fact lower the cost of care. When connected health programs are put to effective use within an Accountable Care Organization, the resulting improvements in health outcomes and reductions in the cost to enable those healthier outcomes, can prove synergistic.

In its simplest terms, connected health uses small health monitoring devices that a patient uses from the comfort and convenience of their own home, to upload results of their therapeutic regimen. The patient's healthcare team monitors that data from the doctor's office. If the readings are within normal parameters, the patient and care team continue on course. If a reading seems abnormal, the healthcare team can interven before the situation gets out of hand. The quality of the care, due to the intensity of the monitoring, improves.

The patient, because they need to be involved in order for this program to work, becomes emotionally and intellectually invested in the program, which has shown to increase patient compliance.

Activity & Wellness

Activity & Wellness programs are designed to motivate patients to maintain and manage their exercise regimen. When a patient enrolls in this type of program they become invested in their health because they take the time to enter their exercise activity and diet details into a computer software program. Essentially, they build a food and exercise log, and the data they enter each day uploads via the internet for their healthcare team to monitor.

Another key component of these programs however, are the gaming or avatar interface that the software provides the patient. Studies have shown that patients have formed an emotional connection to the virtual trainer, or avatar, that welcomes the patient to the computer screen when they sit down to update their log. The virtual trainer encourages and motivates the patient to continue or adjust their exercise and diet plan as needed to help steer the patient toward his or her goals that were logged into the program at the beginning of the process. Activity & Wellness programs like these can help patients become more compliant with diet and exercise therapy, a far less expensive way to reduce the severity of conditions like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes, to name just a few.

Cardiac Care

Cardiac Care programs, like Connected Cardiac Care at Partners Healthcare's Center for Connected Health, was designed to focus on a very expensive condition--heart failure. Patients suffering from heart failure often require vigilant monitoring, and periodic expensive hospital care. Heart failure is a delicate condition. In fact, many heart failure patients are re-admitted within 30 and 60 days of hospital discharge. Not only is this a tremendous challenge to the patient's survivability, it also becomes a financial burden on the hospital because 30-day readmissions are reimbursed at a much lower rate than what it costs to provide hospital care for that patient.

Therefore the cardiac care programs are designed to catch warning signs early, while allowing the patient to live in the comfort of their own home. The patient goes home equipped with small home "tele-health" monitoring devices. Each day, at a time assigned by the healthcare team, the patient measures blood pressure, pulse, oxygen levels, and weight. Through these devices, the patient transmits the readings to a nurse back at the physician's office. If any of the recordings are outside established normal parameters, the nurse alerts the rest of the healthcare team and they are able to implement a strategy to get the patient back into normal levels, hopefully without requiring the patient to report to the hospital. Patient health, convenience, and confidence increases, while the cost of care decreases.