4.6 Article

Perspective on mHealth Concepts to Ensure Users' Empowerment-From Adverse Event Tracking for COVID-19 Vaccinations to Oncological Treatment

Journal

IEEE ACCESS
Volume 9, Issue -, Pages 83863-83875

Publisher

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3087315

Keywords

Medical services; Servers; Protocols; Security; Data transfer; Hospitals; Vaccines; Data communication; device-to-device communication; mobile applications; patient monitoring; public healthcare

Funding

  1. Ministry of Science and Art Baden-Wurttemberg [Zentrum fur Innovative Versorgung (ZIV)]
  2. German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Data Integration for Future Medicine (DIFUTURE) project (Medical Informatics Initiative) [01ZZ1804I]
  3. Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration Baden-Wurttemberg, project feelBack (networked, digital, and patient-related feedback psycho-oncology)

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The increasing presence of mobile applications in the healthcare sector, particularly mHealth apps, has the potential to improve patient empowerment through data collection and communication with healthcare professionals. However, there are ongoing discussions around the reliable setup and effective communication of these apps, with security concerns being of utmost importance. Healthcare providers' skepticism towards utilizing mHealth apps is also a significant aspect that needs to be addressed.
Mobile applications have increasingly entered the healthcare sector. Besides being daily companions, so-called mHealth applications have the potential to enable individuals to collect data, document issues, and share them with healthcare professionals to better adjust medical treatment, side effects, or quality of life. While patient empowerment should be a paramount goal, the setup of these applications in a reliable and communication-effective way is under discussion. In particular, including mHealth applications in the clinical practice routine is crucial to boost their development. Security concerns are of utmost importance as such applications deal with personal data. Considering the sensitive nature of many of the involved data, a trustworthy transfer protocol to the respective health care providers is essential to convince potential users. On the same grounds, healthcare providers, which represent another major stakeholder, might be skeptical of utilizing mHealth applications. This issue is often not prioritized by app developers, and there is a multitude of apps lacking clear and transparent data transfer concepts with a focus on both security and usability. In the following, we present and discuss two different approaches for managing and reporting sensitive clinical information and their secure inter-sectoral transfer. Both use cases are currently implemented into clinical practice, and their applicability is under constant evaluation. Besides, to empower inter-sectoral communication, both approaches have been developed in close collaboration with healthcare providers to maximize both communication and effectiveness of the mHealth applications. Based on our work, we conclude that while mHealth applications can be important in many aspects of improving health care, there are often significant limitations of mHealth-based communication, which can hamper its integration in clinical settings. To overcome these limitations, we show how to apply and re-elaborate on existing security and communication strategies. Finally, we highlight how these approaches can strengthen both patient and healthcare professionals' empowerment.

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