This is particularly true regarding increased prescription compliance.
Spanish online wellness portal, HolaDoctor, is working with mobile enterprise company, 3Cinteractive, and have developed an mhealth plan for physicians to better reach out to the growing population of Hispanic individuals in the United States.
This will allow this ethnic group to better benefit from their Affordable Care Act health coverage.
According to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, this new mhealth tool will give doctors the ability to implement their own types of mobile initiatives in an effort to more effectively reach the over nine million people of Hispanic descent who will be gaining coverage through the health care reforms.
mHealth is an important tool to break the trend among Hispanic people to avoid medical care.
The Hispanic population is one of the fastest growing minorities in the U.S., representing over 16 percent of the entire country’s population. Unfortunately, this demographic is also among the most uninsured ethnic groups in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown that in 2010, a whopping 34 percent of Hispanics younger than 65 years old were without health insurance. In comparison, the non-Hispanic Caucasian population in that age group had an uninsured rate of only 15 percent.
The hope is that with properly targeted mhealth technology and campaigns, those Hispanics who have struggled with cultural and language barriers as well as treatment stigmas and have avoided medical care will now be able to overcome those hurdles and obtain far superior care.
The Latino community is currently viewed as one that is in need of far better medical outreach, and the combined efforts of companies such as HolaDoctor and 3Cinteractive, along with physicians, will hopefully be enough to take down the walls that have been present, so that this situation will dramatically improve.
Many Hispanic people are about to gain insurance for the first time as a result of the Affordable Care Act. By bringing together coverage and the tools to connect Hispanic people with the professionals and services that they need, the disproportion of the chronic disease rates may begin to close.
Mhealth programs are hoped to be those much needed tools Over half of all Hispanics currently have and use a smartphone, when compared to 27 percent of non-Hispanic Caucasians. This makes health communication through apps and websites a phenomenal opportunity for this group.
