How People Use mHealth-devices: 14 Facts To Know

Last week HealthMine published the results of its research “HealthMine Digital Health Report: The State and Impact of Digital Health Tools”, which aimed at understanding how US citizens use digital health tools and how it affects their life.

500 adults using medical devices and mobile apps connected to the Internet at the age of 26-64 participated in the research taking place in Mach-April 2016.

We decided to publish 14 main trends, revealed within the framework of the experiment. Although these data were gathered in USA, other countries also can understand some trends that may become relevant for them.

1. The most popular means of digital health care are apps for fitness and physical training (50%). The lowest adaptation level among population have illness controlling systems, apps for giving up smoking and telemedicine.
2. Users like using their digital devices and apps. 59% of respondents use them at least once a day, 89% consider them easy to use. Moreover, 83% think that received with their help data are rather understandable.
3. 75% of people, using medicine apps are ready to share the data with a doctor and only 32% will agree that they results are sent to doctors automatically.
4. 63% of respondents receive digital reminders about necessary actions by email or text messages from their doctor, healthcare provider or digital gadget (app), but most do not want to receive them.
5. 60% have prepaid electronic health records (EHRs), but only 22% use it to make some decision concerning their health. 44% users with access to their electronic health records do not have the possibility to read information available for the doctor.
6. 39% have never even heard of telemedicine.
7. 55% of respondents who had access to telemedicine had already used such services. 93% of consumers that used medical services reported that they reduced their costs on medicine.
8. 42% of respondents never using telemedicine, stated that they prefer consulting the doctor face-to-face. But even more than a quarter of all asked do not know when it is more convenient to use telemedicine services compared to traditional medicine.
9. 76% of consumers using digital medical services reported that they had improved their health, 57% claimed that such digital means would reduce their healthcare costs.
10. 88% of digital systems users plan to expand the range of digital devices/apps, besides the most popular are apps for reducing stress and “smart” scales.
11. 52% of consumers are members of different health-improving programs and 33% got their medical apps/devices during such programs. But, notwithstanding that 59% have long-term illnesses, only 7% use digital tools to control their health condition.
12. Answering the question what is the main stimulus for using medical means mostly (42%) was “Awareness of my health condition”.

13. Only 10% of consumers admitted that different kinds of encouragement are stimulus for them.