Assessing mHealth: Opportunities and Barriers to Patient Engagement

mHealth—the practice of medicine and public health through the use of mobile devices—presents an opportunity to revolutionize the health care system both in the U.S. and globally. Cell phones, tablet computers, and other wireless devices all play a role in shaping mHealth. mHealth is often presented as a low-cost option for increasing communication between patients and providers, including the sharing of data—also referred to as patient health information (PHI)—and the integration of monitoring devices to achieve broad population health benefits and the potential to decrease or mitigate rising health care costs.1 There is currently limited evidence about how well and under what circumstances mobile phones (and other mobile/wireless devices) compare with or enhance current means to improve health and health care.2 Despite a lack of robust empirical evidence, a number of programs throughout the world and the United States have embraced the mobile device as a platform to engage and educate patients, especially in populations where medical afflictions occur in disparate proportion to the rest of society. These programs, which use short message service (SMS or texting) to share information, are only now being assessed for efficacy in reaching certain disparate populations and for how they can be integrated into the contemporary health care system. A number of polices are already in place to engage and reduce disparities and some of these provide important opportunities to leverage the power of mHealth to achieve their objectives. However, as technologies continue to rapidly evolve, policymakers, clinicians, and academics are lagging further behind the technology curve in assessing the potential of these new technologies to reduce disparities through increased empowerment via education or engagement and improved health outcomes. International mHealth development has focused primarily on engaging rural populations through cellular phones. Mobile devices provide the ability to share information quickly and without the need for additional robust infrastructure. In addition, mobile technologies promise to allow for more care in rural communities through communication with remote providers and through education of the layperson on basic care