A recent study has found that mobile health applications could benefit diabetes patients and that the use of health apps by diabetes patients could improve health outcomes and lower medicine costs. Emerging smart mobile health or mHealth technologies are changing the way patients track information related to diagnosed conditions. This study examined the health and economic impacts of mHealth technologies on the outcomes of diabetes patients in Asia.
The study concluded that compared to patients who did not use mHealth applications, patients who used the apps had better health outcomes and were able to regulate their health behaviour more effectively. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and New York University (NYU). The relatively new area of mHealth includes mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies used for health care services, for example, managing chronic diseases.
Mobile health applications can operate on smartphones, tablets, sensors, and cloud-based computing systems, all of which collect health data on individuals. The global mHealth market was estimated to have reached $ 49 billion by the end of 2020. The researchers measured compliance by looking at detailed patient activities like daily walking steps, exercise time, sleeping pattern, food intake as measured by the app.
The researchers partnered with a top mHealth firm that provides one of the largest mobile health platforms in Asia specializing in diabetes care. The study randomly assigned 1,070 adult patients to different groups for three months: Some patients used the mHealth app, some did not, and some used a web-based version of the app. Researchers interviewed all participants before the study began and five months after it ended. Among the questions asked were those about demographics, medication and medical history, blood glucose and hemoglobin levels, frequency of hospital visits, and medical costs.
The study found that patients who used the mHealth app reduced their blood glucose and hemoglobin levels, even after controlling for individual-level fixed effects. Patients who used
the app also exercised more, slept more, and ate healthier food. And they had fewer hospital visits and lower medical expenses. The authors suggested that patients' adoption of and use of the mHealth app was associated with significant behavioral modifications toward a healthier diet and lifestyle. In this way, users became more autonomously self-regulated with their health behavior, and this increasing intrinsic motivation helped them become more engaged, persistent, and
stable in their behavior, which led to improved health outcomes.
The mHealth platform also facilitated an increased usage of telemedicine, which in turn led to reduced hospital visits and medical expenses for the patients. The study also found that the mHealth platform was more effective in improving patients' health outcomes than a web-based (PC) version of the same app. And non-personalized text messages tended to be more effective in changing patients' behavior than personalized messages, possibly because personalized messages can be viewed as intrusive, coercive, and annoying.
