Existing digital health products hold the potential to save the nation $46 billion in healthcare spending if they're deployed comprehensively, according to a new report from IQVIA, which on Tuesday renamed itself from Quintiles/IMS Health.
"For the first time we've sought to create a model that looks across five different patient population groups where there's been a proven reduction in acute care utilization, typically hospitalization, when consumer mobile apps are used," Murray Aitken, executive director of the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, said in a conference call about the new report. "Diabetes prevention, diabetes care, asthma, cardiac rehabilitation, and pulmonary rehabilitation -- in each of those five areas we took the results from published research and modeled that to estimate that if these available apps today were used by all patients who could benefit from them, the US healthcare system could save $7 billion per year. So that's just for five areas. If that level of savings was achievable across all disease areas, we're looking at annual savings of something like $46 billion."
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In addition to the apps themselves, the report looks at the growing amount of efficacy data available about these apps, based on searches on ClinicalTrials.gov. As of February, there were 869 active trials using digital health technology worldwide and 540 in the US.
IQVIA also notes that a lot of the barriers to adoption that they observed in 2013 and 2015 are starting to come down little by little, as more privacy and security guidelines have been published, app formularies are being established, and the shift to value-based care is continuing.
"We still have a long way to go," Aitken said. "We don't want to overstate the extent to which mobile health apps have become mainstream, but relative to four years ago there's a lot of progress that has been made."
Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on November 7, 2017 09:58 AM
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