A recent study showed that mobile health initiatives need to show their worth to stakeholders.
The results of a study performed by a consulting firm based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, called Cutting Edge Information, has revealed that mhealth pilot programs can be highly beneficial to healthcare groups, as long as they have an endpoint that is clearly identified.
When a pilot program is capable of showing the value of a program, stakeholders are far more interested.
Though this should not come as much of a surprise, it does help to identify precisely what tack mhealth pilots should take in order to make sure that they obtain the support that they want. According to one of the study’s authors, Michelle Vitko, who is a Cutting Edge Information senior analyst, once a concept has undergone a pilot trial and has shown its value, there is a much greater enthusiasm from stakeholders who are then more likely to give their support.
Vitko also released a warning about the creation of their mhealth departments through pilot programs.
Within her report, she announced that “Though pilot programs can be essential to building effective mHealth departments, companies must be careful”. She went on to add that “They must ensure that pilots are used as presentations of value and not merely as tools to mollify calls for greater technology.”
Her suggestion in the article was that mhealth groups should obtain executive buy-in for investments in the future in order to help to prevent the “endless test loop” of pilot programs in this sector. The article also recommended that by basing the decisions regarding the development of the projects on observations of scenarios observed in real life, there will be a far greater likelihood not only for the success of that project, but of investment into future projects, as well.
This aligned with the report that was made in a different study that was released nearly at the same time, which indicated that even though there have been hundreds of pilot studies regarding mhealth programs, there has yet to be sufficient programmatic evidence to support their larger scale implementation.