Smartphone - A User-friendly Device to Deliver Affordable Healthcare - A Practical Paradigm

Field: Health Professions (Health Sciences)

Introduction: The cutting edge Technology of the 21st generation has proven to relinquish major positive enhancements and has left a huge impact in modern day medicine and health care. The Smartphone is one of the most commonly used devices in communication. It’s rightly known as a “Handy-portal computer” which has made infinite contribution by its multitasked usages besides the specifically designed applications programmed to reach a quick and sound clinical decisions, these devices are also helping in health record maintenance, patient Management, education and training of healthcare professionals. This Journey of enhanced technology coverage with existing wisdom of the field can prove to be a major boon for mankind.
Objective: To highlight the enhanced contribution of the Smartphone in today`s modern medicine by demonstrating the potential of technology and its future applications, be it for patient, implementation in healthcare and continuing medical education, for cross consultations, patient satisfaction, and removing communication barriers. Care has been taken to define and evaluate utility of evidence based technological advancements in the healthcare sector.
Methodology: In this study, a systematic review of literature was done via Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) for systematic review. Google scholar and MEDLINE were used to identify articles that discussed the utility design, development, evaluation, and utility of smartphone-based software for healthcare workers, professionals, medical or nursing students, or patients. A total of 59 articles discussing 88 applications were selected for this study from 2,934 articles initially obtained from the PubMed, scholar, and Medline searches.
Conclusions: The role of this technology in medicine and healthcare is seen to be promising and technologically exciting to use. We have tried to analyze and discussed many smartphone/App-based healthcare applications that are available in the literature. We also had found that most of these applications are grouped as per the target users namely the clinicians, administrators, medical and nursing students. Further as these applications were originally not intended to replace old desktop based applications, but to add to existing pool of technologies for better healthcare. The functional uses of these Apps are growing every day. The enhanced mobile connectivity and communication between health care professionals have contributed to ease and validity of medical care besides monitoring, access to evidence based medicine which includes better diagnosis guides, drug references, literature search, and continuing medical education materials at the point of care. Further as easy access is provided to all authorized personal of records, this has resulted in remote consultation and telemedicine. Further, Apps like Netra performing visual acuity test is also viable using a smartphone. The easy and widespread adoption of these mobile health technologies by the general masses further emphasize the opportunity of better mHealth and mobile telemedicine services through patient oriented applications.