The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 7

Deploying mHealth: Overcoming Barriers to Adoption
Many medical disciplines are now underscored by the use of data-driven systems,
yet the data, itself, can be the source of
problems. New care and insurance models, electronic information transmission,
and inter-connected boundaries among
industry participants increases the complexity of managing protected health
information. The consequences of digitising healthcare means that there are an
ever-increasing number of networked
connections within the system, which
in turn is increasing the chance of data
breaches, malware infections, and vulnerability to unauthorised access.
As technology disseminates beyond the
confines of the hospital or GP practice
the challenges of maintaining data integrity become even more difficult. Introducing mobile and digital solutions to
a range of stakeholders, using different
technology providers, decentralises the
role of data management, which can in
turn result in greater opportunity for
breach. Similarly, where organisations
use ‘bring-your-own-device (BYOD)’

Applications must be able to communicate, which means developers and
system providers need to use internationally accepted standards, in order to
ensure that they can be easily adopted.
These standards become even more vital
when organisations begin to demand and
implement a multi-system solution, and
require those solutions to inter-connect.
In order to be effective, technology must
also integrate within work flows. Healthcare professionals are unlikely to use a
system that places unnecessary, additional, burdens on their time or working
practices. Careful strategic management
is needed to ensure that a solution does
what it is designed to do; that in doing
so it does not add additional complication to existing care packages; and
that the necessary support structures
are instigated to help deliver seamless
deployment. This may mean using small
trails to test deployment, and determine
implementation strategies. It may also
mean ensuring that the necessary training and assistance is in place, to help

considered proprietary and is held within
compartmentalised silos, all of which
have different ownership, management
and processing protocols.
It is recognised, that for a true digital
revolution of healthcare, it is necessary for the many different IT, mobile/
digital systems, and networks to interact,
and exchange data, with one another. In
doing so this delivers systems that are
able to analyse, and utilise, data in order
to derive useful insight. This exchange
of data across networks is something
that has traditionally been problematic,
and despite some changes for the better,
remains a major barrier to deployment.

ADOPTION AT SCALE
The ability to deploy mobile and digital
health solutions across a small number
of users, is relatively straight-forward.
Difficulties arise when trying to deliver
those same solutions at scale, to a much
larger user base. Increasing users, raises
the amount of data produced, as well

Despite the promise and potential of mobile
and digital health solutions...there remains a
significant number of ‘barriers’ that continue to
hinder adoption and dissemination of technology
methods to deploy mobile technologies
then it becomes necessary to implement
robust models for asset management,
policy enforcement, and distributing
profiles, apps and content.
Potential patient safety, economic, and
reputational damage may arise if organisations lack appropriate security and privacy controls.

INTEGRATION
The ability to effectively integrate mobile
and digital health solutions within existing infrastructure is critical. Integration
encompasses both the technological and
the human factors of care delivery.

users adapt to the technology.

DATA SILOS
The current rise of data-driven solutions
in healthcare is resulting in the creation
of large volumes of clinical, personal,
operational, and institutional data that is
growing at a rapid pace. As more digital
solutions are deployed then consequently
the amounts of data will continue to rise.
Data can obviously have very significant
and beneficial outcomes on health, however, it can also be problematic. As we
discussed earlier there are the issues of
data management, but one must also
consider the challenges of cross network
data connections. At present much of
the data collected via digital systems is

as the required number of connections involved. It also means that there
are greater burdens on networks, an
increased potential for security breaches,
as well as difficulties integrating with
other care provision. Each issue grows
exponentially with the addition of u