The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 1 (Feb 2014) | Page 29

EUROPE

EPHA Briefing on Mobile Health
EUROPE

EPHA Briefing on Mobile Health
The European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) is the European Platform bringing together public
health organisations representing health professionals, patients groups, health promotion and
disease specific NGO’s, academic groupings and other health associations. This is the full version
of the briefing reproduce with permission of the EPHA.

INTRODUCTION
The use of mobile and wireless technologies to support the achievement of health
objectives (mHealth) has the potential to
transform the face of health service delivery (...) A powerful combination of factors is driving this change. These include
rapid advances in mobile technologies and
applications, a rise in new opportunities
for the integration of mobile health into
existing eHealth services and the continued growth in coverage of mobile cellular
networks [1].
To date, no standardised definition
of mHealth has been established.
According to the National Institution of Health in the United States,
it can be defined as ‘using mobile
and wireless devices to improve
health outcomes, healthcare services and health research’ [2]. It is a
subcomponent of the larger discipline of eHealth [3], which in turn
describes the use of Information
and Communication Technologies
(ICT) for health purposes. Due to
its wider accessibility via mobile devices – especially smartphones and
self-monitoring gadgets - mHealth
is a key emergent area in health
today [4]. It includes solutions for
direct care provision in health services, real-time monitoring of patients’ conditions, the provision of
healthcare information to health
professionals, patients and re-

searchers, and it can support public
health, e.g. by collecting community and clinical health data.
As stressed on the European
Commission’s Digital Agenda for
Europe website, ‘mobile health
doesn’t focus exclusively on the device, but on the fact that the information and data is mobile (…) The
information is able to be collected
wherever it is needed and transmitted wherever it needs to go,’ [5]. A
commercially lucrative sector with
global reach, mHealth could become an important growth market
under the Digital Agenda [6], as
evidenced by hundreds of smartphone ‘apps’ placed on the market
every week.
But mHealth’s adaptability and
faculty to provide information ‘on
the go’ also poses new challenges
for healthcare. The Commission’s
eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020,
rightly declares that ‘(…) such applications potentially offer information, diagnostic tools, possibilities to ‘self-quantify’ as well as
new modalities of care. They are
blurring the distinction between
the traditional provision of clinical
care by physicians, and the self-administration of care and wellbeing.’
[7] While the extent of its impact
on health systems is difficult to
predict, mHealth is set to play a

role in renegotiating the relationship between health professionals
and patients. In so doing it triggers ethical questions about who is
steering and managing health, and
what this means for society.
Crucially, while mHealth holds
potential for improving access to
healthcare services and mitigating
health inequalities, it cannot substitute face-to-face contact. Like
other eHealth solutions, it is best
deployed as a complementary tool
for the benefit of end users. Provided that the challenges described
below can be overcome, It can help
improve quality and continuity of
care [8], inter alia by facilitating elements of healthcare provision and
remote monitoring, allowing crossborder and interregional collaboration between health institutions
and professionals, and providing
more user-friendly and comprehensible ways for different categories of patients to manage health,
including d