Adopting Health Apps, What’s Hindering Doctors and Patients?

Abstract

There are high expectations for Mobile Health to transform health into a sustainable and prevention-based system. Unfortunately it has not reached its scale of adoption many had hoped for, due to the existence of adoption barriers. More insight into these barriers fosters adoption of mHealth and the innovation it can bring to worldwide healthcare. This study investigates the main barriers in the adoption of mHealth, their underlying causes and their breakthrough possibilities. All the data are gathered from an international and multi-stakeholder point of view. First of all we tried to identify the main barriers by doing an international literature study. Second of all we asked Dutch mHealth Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to rank the barriers to importance. These KOLs were from different stakeholder groups; policy-makers, users and developers. At last we asked the KOLs in interviews for underlying causes and breakthrough opportunities of the barriers. Eventually twelve main adoption barriers emerged. According to literature and to the KOLs the most important barriers are "Integration and interoperability" and "Business case". An underlying cause for the barrier "Integration and interoperability" might be the active closed power system of technology suppliers, which exists in the Netherlands. Furthermore there seems to be a difference in the importance of the barriers "Privacy and security" and "Conservative culture" when perceptions of Dutch KOLS and international literature are compared. Within the stakeholders-groups, the KOLs think differently about the importance of the barriers "Visionless development" and "Competing payment mechanism". The Dutch healthcare insurers could take a more leading role in the fragmented landscape of mHealth in the Netherlands, by strategically funding new initiatives that use open standards and deliver better value for end-users. Other chances might lie in the international cooperation between countries to overcome certain barriers.

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“…However, users and developers rank the importance lower than policy-makers. This might be since users, such as doctors, benefit from the current payment mechanism; consequently they might not perceive it as an important barrier [134].…”

“…Telehealth, in its more general sense, enables the delivery of healthcare services directly to the home environment of the patients, extending and enhancing the level of care [291]. Actually, in the last decades several works have showed that using Information Technologies (IT) on health domain reached positive conclusions [134]. For chronic and long-term disease management telehealth offers a broad range of potential tools that can enhance the health outcomes and effectiveness of the care delivery.…”

“…Adopting standard solutions, or converting existing data to new standards, maybe more expensive. Cooperation between countries as well as casestudy research on successful large-scale rollouts of mHealth strategies could give new information on how barriers have successfully been overcome and they might result in better uptake of mHealth [134].…”

“…ICT for health is still promoted by technologists with little direct connection to health care professionals and the real world of clinical practice [104]. Also, recently Dehzad et al studied the barriers in the adoption of health apps [134]. They investigated the main barriers in the adoption of mHealth, their underlying causes and their breakthrough possibilities.…”

“…These KOLs were from different stakeholder groups; policy-makers, users and developers Figure 23. Explanation for these barriers Explanations range from macro-level systemic barriers (such as lack of enabling healthcare policy) to micro level individual barriers (such as perceived complexity and resistance from physicians) [134].…”