×

New technologies and breakthroughs are continually driving momentum and change in the health care industry, from fighting Ebola in West Africa to improving physician workflow.

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions regularly reports in Health Care Current on developments that aim to improve health outcomes and increase the value delivered by the U.S. health care system.

Mobile Apps Help Fight Against Ebola

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the 2014 Ebola outbreak is the largest Ebola outbreak in history and the first in West Africa. The CDC maintains that Ebola is not a major threat in the U.S., but the range of this recent outbreak is a reminder of how quickly infectious disease can spread. In an effort to manage infectious disease outbreaks, health care workers and governments are now using technologies such as mobile apps and related mobile tracking tools.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s poorest region, but mobile text messaging has made it easier for the public health infrastructure to respond. The CDC has distributed free mobile app versions of software that transmits diagrams to assist field workers attempting to contain this most recent Ebola outbreak. These technologies are similar to a phone-based system called mTrac (Medicine Tracking System) used in Uganda to transmit texts and help keep remote AIDS and vaccine clinics stocked with drugs and provide health care workers with real-time updates. During a 2012 outbreak of the Marburg virus, a disease that has similar symptoms to Ebola, Uganda’s Ministry of Health used mTrac to send almost 1,000 SMS messages to hundreds of health workers in the affected districts.

Analysis: There are more mobile phone subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa than in the U.S. or Europe, and the cellular market in Africa is expected to grow to 1.12 billion subscribers by 2017. In countries like Kenya, more than 90 percent of the population now have their own mobile device or have access to one through a relative or village elder, while only about 1 percent has land lines. In the developing world, mobile health is not simply a valuable adjunct to improving health care quality, but a critical part of the health system infrastructure. Strategies to battle infectious disease outbreaks in developing countries include countering misinformation, empowering health teams, and ramping up efforts to track and monitor the situation. With limited resources, health care leaders should consider focusing on maximizing available tools and technologies such as for mHealth.

Though the promise of these technologies could be great, there is a need for standards on how to use the data, as well as more evaluation into what strategies work. The Fogarty Center at the National Institutes of Health funds the training of researchers in the developing world and has started an initiative to support research on mobile health tools and interventions for an array of health issues.

New Digital Tool May Improve Physician Workflow

Much of the U.S. health care delivery system still relies on paper documents for collecting and transmitting information. Mountain View, California-based company Listrunner raised money from independent physician investors to continue building and testing its centralized clinical communication platform that helps bring hospital physicians into the digital age.

Many hospital clinicians still spend much of their day scribbling clinical notes on paper lists of patients printed from an electronic health record (EHR), or a spreadsheet built from the data. They then need to communicate that information to other clinicians and support staff. Often this communication is inefficient and does not always ensure patient data is secure. Even hospitals that rely on an EHR do not all have access to care coordination apps that are fully integrated into physician workflow.

Listrunner, which is currently being tested in 12 hospital departments, allows physicians to keep their patient lists, summaries, updates, and task lists in digital form and exchange critical information with other caregivers and staff on a common, secure platform. Listrunner works with several common EHR platforms, and encrypts and stores clinical data on a central server that can transmit real-time data to other connected computers, phones, or tablets.

Analysis: Digital health tools such as this one could improve workflow and acceptance of health information technology. This type of tool may improve health IT interoperability efforts by making it easier to capture quality clinical data in real time (reducing data transformations that are needed when data is simply scanned or transcribed from notes). If workflow is made easier, these tools could increase physician acceptance and use of EHRs. Improved workflow and data capture may reduce medical errors. It has been 15 years since the Institute of Medicine published its "To Err Is Human" report, which put a spotlight on the issue of preventable medical errors in the U.S. health care system, and more recent reports still demonstrate that avoidable errors in hospitals are a major cause of death every year.