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The marketplace is saturated with mobile health apps, but few operate on an enterprise-grade level and can unite payers, providers, and patients in a friendly, seamless way. Even more elusive is a platform that fits this bill and is HIPAA compliant, guidelines based, and developed in conjunction with clinician thought leaders.
The challenges that face this endeavor include IT integration across stakeholder systems, meeting high user expectations, developing effective marketing channels, and navigating enterprise security requirements. All this, and it has to be engaging to consumers too.
Wildflower Health, a San Francisco-based technology company, is meeting these challenges and changing the engagement conversation. Since 2012, their smartphone-based maternity program, called Due Date Plus, has been helping women have healthier pregnancies by tracking their milestones, looking up symptoms and issues, and connecting to healthcare providers and services driven by health plans and Medicaid.
Mobile health (mHealth) programs are especially important in the Medicaid community, which makes up nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies. Smartphone penetration has increased over the last four years by 96.7 percent overall. Within low-income communities (households with income less than $30,000), smartphone use has skyrocketed from 22 percent in 2011 to 50 percent in 2015. In addition, nearly 50 percent of physicians use mHealth apps on a daily basis. The mobile platform has become the common denominator.
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