Horizontal models of information exchange are not something new, but in healthcare, patient involvement in processes is still underestimated.
Health Connecting
Communication and tight collaboration lie at the core of any healthcare efforts. The more patients are involved in the process, the higher is the chance they will be able to maintain positive dynamics and reach their treatment goals.
However, the complexity of medical examination and data analysis often creates a significant barrier between doctors and patients. The latter are more prone to share their worries and fears with patients with the same diagnoses. The lack of trust remains the primary problem affecting the prevention and treatment outcome.
But the new advancements in technology create essential building blocks for the development of promising HealthTech solutions. Innovations have the potential to wipe out the barrier between healthcare professionals and patients, ensuring better efficiency of interventions and enhanced communication.
Meet Your Peer
With such a rapid development of mobile technologies, institutions across all domains cannot just ignore these trends. According to the recent figures presented by Statista, the number of smartphone users hit 3.5 billion in 2020, and it is projected to increase up to 3.8 billion in 2021.
Such rapid growth in mobile technologies has resulted in the appearance of apps designed to provide behavioral interventions for a broader audience. This software makes behavioral treatment more accessible to different social groups and makes data gathering easier for healthcare workers.
What are P2P Medical Apps?
P2P applications in healthcare aim to bring doctors and patients in a single environment where they can collaborate and exchange information to arrive at a proper diagnosis.
The data collected by software can be further used to complement medical records, which might bring significant insights into the patient’s well-being.
Thus, P2P medical apps allow making a more accurate diagnosis and enhance data collection and processing in healthcare organizations.
Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash
Currently, you can find different types of P2P apps on the market. The majority of them are applied to identify behavioral changes among patients and diagnose non-communicable diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes, mental health, etc.)
Health-tracking and fitness apps are also actively applied in different interventions to help patients stick to a healthy diet and develop individual exercising plans. Users can monitor their physical activity and control their nutrition, while medical workers can use this information to make a proper diagnosis. Also, these apps allow mitigating health risks by altering patients’ behavior and help them lead a healthy lifestyle.
Find Your App
Although modern medicine progresses at an unprecedented level, there is still a group of high-risk diseases — bloodborne infectious diseases and viral infections. Such diseases like HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis, meningitis, malaria are spreading rapidly among the world’s population.
Poverty groups and individuals with addictions are especially vulnerable to these illnesses. To prevent the spread of epidemics, healthcare professionals came up with a set of peer-driven interventions that aim to eliminate risky practices among patients.
Peer-driven interventions aim to develop healthy behavioral patterns among the affected group of patients and encourage users to educate peers to build the same habits for which proper compensation is provided.
Peer education is a crucial component of any intervention as it facilitates positive changes among all social groups. Patients receive public affirmation for acting correctly, which helps develop the necessary behavioral patterns to reach their treatment goals. Thus, such practices influence peers’ attitudes and knowledge, creating a community of like-minded people.
What is Peer-Driven Intervention?
It's an effective and low-cost intervention methodology that taps into 6 critical elements of behavior change:
- knowledge,
- skill building,
- motivation,
- peer influence,
- social norms,
- and repetition.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
In this perspective, PDI medical apps help establish a single ecosystem where people with the same health interest can chat, collaborate, and engage in meaningful conversations.
The primary challenge here is that users won’t find such apps in the app markets. While there exists a PDI model, the apps here are used fragmentally, mostly for helping to fulfill separate tasks.
At the same time, there is a quick fix that meets these requirements. For example, Peer-drive intervention Solution that is paperless, allows testing and recruiting online and, what is the most important, keeping anonymity while answering interviewers' questions. It can significantly improve users’ well-being and promote healthy habits among the targeted groups.
Use Your Technology
Technology and medicine might become a perfect duo. For example, if doctors decide to create a platform for clinical research in a group of people suffering from diabetes, HIV, etc. Or, treat working in such groups for themselves and their colleagues as a learning system.
Technology allows combining the experiences of patients, doctors, and their families to make an accurate diagnosis and choose the best course of action based on the data collected from different sources. Such solutions can reduce the risk of disease spreading and improve the health outcomes for all groups involved.