Status of mobile computing in health care: an evidence study

Information technology (IT) has played an impacting role in helping healthcare professionals increasingly recognize the value of IT in clinical medicine, disease management, treatment strategies and other related areas. Of the numerous IT applications currently pursued, the use of telemedicine is a major force in addressing the healthcare delivery issues. As evidenced by a number of studies, telemedicine has come to play a significant mode of delivery and treatment, especially in the remote rural areas. Despite the growing interest, the R&D advances and the vast number of telemedicine applications currently ongoing, there still seem to be only a few quantitative studies characterizing the economic aspects of telemedicine and how cost-effective such solutions are. Of particular interest to the healthcare community is the effectiveness of the emerging mobile communications in telemedicine especially in home healthcare environment. In this paper we report on a profile of the current status of the use of mobile devices based on an extensive literature search of 213 articles. In particular we have focused our research on reports of the cost effectiveness of mobile telemedicine applications with respect to improved quality of care and medical error reduction. Preliminary results are reported in the paper, with an extended discussion to be provided in the final conference presentation, based on outcomes obtained from a more robust data analysis.