Typical management of chronic conditions is through sporadic office visits. But health indicators (such as blood pressure) can fluctuate significantly within a day. The infrequent office visits, however, offer the provider little information about the medical history of the patient between office visits resulting in delayed and sometimes inappropriate interventions.
Use of mobile health (mHealth) technology in clinical care can help make appropriate interventions at the patient's location before the worsening condition leads to costlier consequences. mHealth enables patients to remotely upload measurements and providersto continuously monitor these measurements and intervene if necessary. mHealth, therefore, results in bidirectional information flow between providers and patients, thereby reducing information asymmetry. Our study examines redesigning of chronic care delivery using mHealth. It is important to make sure the redesigned delivery process is both efficient (reduces cost) and effective (improves patient health). In this paper, we first present a big picture of the redesigned care delivery process. We then show how this delivery process can improve patient health by analyzing a panel dataset of 1627 patients. We examine the relationship between use of mobile health applications and quality of care delivery for hypertensive patients. We observe the blood pressure readings to decrease with frequency of app usage and time since adoption. With the use of mHealth apps increasing in the post COVID-19 era, our analysis indicates an efficient use of physician's time and an increased role for support-staff under the supervision of the physician. The chronic care delivery process can therefore be redesigned with the help of mHealth, improving patient health and reducing cost for both patients and providers.